Beyond the visual:
Delcy Morelos: Madre, 2025.
Artwork
During my time at Berlin Summer School, I experienced Delcy Morelo’s Madre (2025), at Hamburger Bahnhof, an immersive installation created on site over several weeks, weaving clay, water and soil over a base of wood, iron and straw. The materials: clay, soil, straw, hay, cinnamon, cloves, buckwheat, chia seeds, and honey, carry their own energies and memories, ritual and transformation, inviting communion with something beyond the visible. Through its scale and sensory presence, the dark, fragrant, womb-like form of the installation stirs memories of physicality, childhood, ritual, and the Earth.
For me, this monumental wok radiates warmth, scent, and earthy density, reflecting on the maternal qualities of the earth: its role as a source of life and a place of return. Its presence allows the body to belong within the space, offering a rare combination of intimacy yet monumentality, groundedness yet transcendence, conjuring Earth as a living, maternal, and sensuous force.
I am particularly drawn to the ways in which the installation engages senses beyond the visual. The scent of clove and cinnamon immediately enveloped me, stirring visceral memories of my motherland, creating an intimate, protective space within time, one that feels welcoming and familiar to me.
In my own work, I explore the connection between body and land, reflecting on home as embedded in place. I investigate the immaterial qualities of scent, using charred pine and caraway seeds, while the care in my braiding, weaving, and constructing domestic realms embed the immaterial elements of time, memory, and belonging into my work.
Delcy Morelos, Madre, 2025. Clay, soil, straw, hay, cinnamon, cloves, buckwheat, chia seeds, honey. Installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Photographs by the author.
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