The hall that forgot its own scale
Walk into Bozar’s Horta Hall this summer and the first thing that happens is a small disorientation. The space is grand, marble floored, lit by a soaring glass roof, the kind of room built to hold sculpture on pedestals and portraits on walls. Instead, half of it has been swallowed by a mountain of raw earth.
This is Uterus in Uterus, the 2026 edition of Bozar Monumental, and it is the work of Colombian artist Delcy Morelos.
What it actually is
The piece is a trapezoidal structure, 14 metres long and 9 metres wide, built from a framework of hazel panels layered with local red clay, spices, and natural fibres. Depending on where you stand, it reads as a pyramid, a temple, or a nest. Morelos has cited Mesoamerican pyramids, Egyptian mastabas, and Amazonian maloca houses as reference points, and all three are visible in the form if you look for them.
Walk around it and you find narrow trenches cut into the mass, corridors just wide enough for one person, that lead to smaller chambers inside. The walls are close, the ceiling of each trench climbs high overhead, and the earthen texture up close looks almost woven, like a giant thatched or fibrous surface rather than solid clay.
Visitors are invited to remove their shoes and walk the interior barefoot.
It’s not just visual
Morelos works with scent as deliberately as she works with material. For this installation she commissioned a professional fragrance designer to create a scent specific to the piece, evoking humid soil, wood, cinnamon, and natural oils. The smell reaches you before you’re even inside the trenches, a quiet layer most visitors don’t expect from a sculpture.
There’s a clear intention behind the material choice too. Horta Hall’s floor and columns are marble, and Morelos points out that marble and clay share the same origin: both come from the mountains. The cold, permanent stone of the historic hall and the warm, malleable earth of the installation are put in direct conversation with each other.
Location: Horta Hall, Bozar (Centre for Fine Arts of Brussels), Rue Ravensteinstraat 23, 1000 Brussels
Dates: 28 June to 30 August 2026
Admission: Free
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00
Series: Bozar Monumental, supported by BNP Paribas Fortis, in collaboration with BC Materials and the Studiotopia project
Worth the visit?
Yes, especially if you go on a quieter day when you can actually walk the interior trenches without a queue behind you. Photographs (including the ones in this post) capture the scale reasonably well, but the smell, the texture under your bare feet, and the way the light drops as you move from the open hall into the narrow corridors are the parts that don’t translate to a photo. It’s one of the more memorable free things to see in Brussels this summer.
