Desde la tierra/From the earth is a research and/or curatorial inquiry that documents contemporary artistic practices in Latin America engaging soil-based materials such as clay, adobe, sand, and earth.
The project investigates how artists work with these materials to produce embodied relations between humans and earthly matter, generating forms of knowledge rooted in sensory experience and physical interaction.
Rather than treating soil as a passive medium, Desde la tierra approaches it as an active material partner that shapes artistic processes and meanings. By examining how artists and audiences encounter and are affected by these materials, the project highlights the processual and relational character of these practices.
Through documentation and critical analysis, Desde la tierra seeks to capture art history as it unfolds, mapping the artistic inquiry across the region. It will take multiple forms – including a digital platform, exhibitions, and publications- creating a space for artists, researchers, and curators from Latin America to contribute perspectives on these practices and their broader cultural, ecological, and epistemological implications.
Approach and Methodology
Desde la tierra is a research and/or curatorial project documenting and studying contemporary artistic practices in Latin America that engage soil-based materials. It investigates artists who work with materials such as clay, adobe, sand, and earth, mobilizing the ground not merely as a sculptural medium but as a site of encounter where bodies, matter, and histories converge.
Emerging from preliminary research spanning the past three decades, the project identifies a constellation of practices that approach soil as both material and interlocutor. These practices vary widely in form – installation, performance, ritual gestures, community-based processes, and material experimentation – yet they share a sustained attention to embodied interaction with earthly matter. The project refers to this field of practices through the working term earthing as artistic process that activate the encounter between human bodies and sil as a mode of sensing, making, and knowing. Rather than approaching these works primarily through national narratives or identity-based frameworks, Desde la tierra foregrounds the material relation between artist and ground. Clay, sand, and soil appear not as inert resources but as active participants in the formation of artistic meaning. Through touch, pressure, weight, erosion, and transformation, these materials shape the gestures, temporalities, and epistemologies of the practices they sustain.
The project attends to how such encounters reconfigure the relationship between the body and the earth in a time marked by ecological crisis and epistemic fragmentation. In many of these works, soil becomes a site where perception is recalibrated and where alternative forms of attention emerge, forms that resist the disembodied logics of modern knowledge production. Rather than positioning themselves solely as critique, these practices often operate as proposals for experiments in sensing, inhabiting, and imagining otherwise.
New artistic gestures and signs
These practices vary widely in form — installation, performance, ritual gestures, community-based processes, and material experimentation — yet they share a sustained attention to embodied interaction with earthly matter. The project refers to this field of practices through the working term earthing, understood as an artistic process that activates the encounter between human bodies and the soil as a mode of sensing, making, and knowing.
Aesthetic and epistemological disruption
Desde la tierra engages with theoretical perspectives that examine the entanglement of knowledge, coloniality, and embodiment, drawing on the work of thinkers including Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, and Suely Rolnik. In dialogue with these frameworks, the project explores how artistic practices grounded in bodily engagement with matter can open spaces for other epistemic orientations; forms of knowing that arise through sensation, relation, and material co-presence.
At the same time, the project resists framing these practices as culturally essential or geographically exceptional. While the research focuses on artists working within Latin American contexts, it approaches these works as situated practices rather than as expressions of a singular regional identity. The emphasis remains on the relational field between bodies, materials, and environments through which these works unfold.
Formats and voices
Conceived as a living research platform, Desde la tierra documents art history as it is taking shape. Its outcomes will include a digital platform, curatorial exhibitions, and critical publications that bring together artists, curators, and researchers engaged with soil-based artistic practices. Through these formats, the project seeks to cultivate a space for dialogue around the aesthetic, ecological, and epistemic implications of working from and with the ground.