Nostalgia for the earth

Arts of the Earth, the new exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until 3 May, is not a "thematic" exhibition, but a device for interpreting the present, capable of interweaving artistic practices, scientific knowledge and pre-modern forms of knowledge around an issue often taken for granted: soil as the infrastructure of life. The path refuses a didactic or chronological scansion, preferring a constellation of material and ecopoetic affinities.

The earth, in all its declinations - clay, humus, mud, sediment and compost - thus becomes both medium and subject, eschewing both metaphor and nostalgia for an intact nature. Here the planet is not a scenario, but an interlocutor, a sensitive and vulnerable system that requires care, time and attention. The selected works - from historical Land Art to more recent research - show how work with organic materials and living processes has progressively eroded the disciplinary boundaries between sculpture, architecture, agronomy and craftsmanship. The presence of living plant species, maintained in unconventional museum conditions and destined for transplantation, makes explicit a transformation of the museum itself, from a space of conservation to a place of negotiation between permanence and change. In this sense, Arts of the Earth - curated by Manuel Cirauqui - suggests a revision of the concept of artistic production, understood no longer as an extractive act but as a pact of cooperation. Phytoremediation practices, controlled decomposition processes, the use of local materials and the rejection of air transport of the works are not accessory elements, but integral parts of a thought that assumes sustainability as an operational criterion, not as an ideological framework. As Gilles Deleuze wrote, "there is no creation without a certain necessity"; the necessity that runs through this exhibition is not the illustration of a crisis, but the elaboration of forms capable of inhabiting a world that has already been transformed. Thus emerges a proposal that does not indulge in catastrophism nor in the celebration of innovation, but invites to recognise in the soil - biological matrix and cultural archive - a possible measure to rethink the shared future.

Arts of the Earth - Guggenheim Bilbao until 3 May 2026