Event details
Thursday, February 8, 2024
3–6 pm, every 30 minutes

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free.

Over the past decade, Delcy Morelos has focused on site-responsive installations, often producing earth-lined rooms that allude to flood lines left in rainforests, burial grounds, and archeological sites, underscoring the cyclical nature of life and reminding us that the earth is the place we all return to. Along these conceptual lines, in 2019 Morelos created Moradas (Dwellings), a site-specific installation presented at Galería Santa Fe in Bogotá, Colombia, where a segment of the gallery—including walls, floors, and columns—was painted with local soil. Viewers entered the work via a single unpainted pathway to look over an assortment of mysterious soil-painted objects resembling things like root vegetables or unidentified remains. To accompany Moradas, the artist wrote a poetic text that articulates, through a series of associative invocations, the notion of the earth as our last home to which we arrive at the hands of violence or natural cycles. For Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023), her latest work in the series, which is on view at Dia Chelsea, Morelos returns to an arrangement of enigmatic objects—salvaged materials from past Dia installations covered in dark soil alongside black ceramics sourced from the Amazonas and Tolima departments of Colombia—which she presents on the soil-painted floor.

In conjunction with the current exhibition, the 2019 poetic text will be read in the gallery, in both Spanish and English.

About the program series 
In conjunction with Delcy Morelos: El abrazo, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

More information on the full program series is available here.