Arts of the Earth: Bilbao imagines the museum of the future – World – Arte.it

World – Is it possible to pay tribute to the Earth at a time when the planet needs the most care?
This time the question is posed by art, which brings together different languages, from sculpture to installation, from drawing to architecture, from craftsmanship to performance, to present an inventory of instruments and future scenarios in the face of climate change and the eco-social crisis that the planet is experiencing.
In this way, ancestral materials such as earth, wood, leaves, roots and plants find renewed relevance.
The exhibition will take place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from December 5 to May 3 Arts of the Eartha journey that explores the way contemporary art interacts with the soil, understood as a shared material space and ecosystem.
The exhibition is sponsored by Iberdrola, which also lends three works from its collection for this occasion.
Concern for the health of the planet and for the survival of the soil becomes the driving force behind an exploration of artistic expressions across planetary regions. Artifacts made with soil, wood, leaves, roots, plants and ancestral materials that take on new importance today will form the basis of a series of interventions in the area. Through different approaches to natural action, starting from Land Art, the exhibition explores the different ways in which humans seek to express their synergies with the living processes of the Earth.
Arts of the Earth will bring together works of art from the last century to today, including some objects that express the wisdom of the Basques and other ancestral cultures. In the cross-sectional study, the route will present works by Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, David Bestué, Heidi Bucher, Gabriel Chaile, Jean Dubuffet, Giuseppe Penone, Claire Pentecost, Perejaume, Solange Pessoa, to name just a few of the artists present in Bilbao. By abandoning a rigid division into thematic sections, the exhibition will bring out material affinities through a curatorial network made up of encounters, coincidences and conversations. Gradually, some protagonists, such as Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys, take on the role of first emissaries, imagining the mutation that art has undergone between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century as a result of climate change. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the development of ephemeral works in landscape, such as those of the Romanian artist Ana Lupas, the Catalan Fina Miralles and the Cuban Ana Mendieta, converged with the production of sand or straw sculptures, such as those of the American sculptor Meg Webster and Giovanni Anselmo.

Jorge Satorre, I could never forget how you told me everything without saying anything (relief), 2021 | Courtesy of the artist and Carreras Mugica © Jorge Satorre, Bilbao 2025

During Arts of the Earth, galleries 206 and 207 will feature botanical compositions, such as living sculptures by the conceptual artist Hans Haacke. Mother tongue by American-Pakistani artist Asad Raza will bring together 26 trees of different species that will be replanted in the Basque Country at the end of the exhibition.
The initiative coming to the Guggenheim will also devote ample space to working in clay, sand and experimental mixtures. Argentinian Gabriel Chaile will create a large charcoal mural directly on the walls of the museum, while David Bestué will create modular works for the occasion using mud from the Nervión River. The exhibition also presents the results of the processes of dissolution or modification of underground sculptural bodies in the work of Patricia Dauder and Jorge Satorre. If the abstract landscapes of Asunción Molinos Gordo will be made with a mixture of wool from all sheep breeds of the Iberian Peninsula, an installation of swallows’ nests spread across different parts of the exhibition will complement the chromatic explorations of Amazonian biodiversity in the work of Susana Mejía.
At the end of the course, Arts of the Earth will offer a reflection on the possibility of “sustainable art”. If Giuseppe Penone does this through one of his first trees carved into the large trunks of other trees, and with a large glass nail resting on thousands of laurel leaves, the Spaniard Ibarrola will illustrate the experimental richness of the practice of an artist who undertook a radical ecological turn in his work in the early 1980s.
The energy efficiency of the exhibition project was combined with the exclusive use of compostable or recycled elements in the furniture and museography. By renouncing air transport, avoiding the construction of rigid boxes and implementing virtual tracking of the loaned works, the exhibition aims to act as a prototype not only of objects of perception and means of action, but also of the strategies and criteria that define the Museum of the Future.