'ARTS OF THE EARTH' AT MUSEO GUGGENHEIM BILBAO
- Victoria Comstock-Kershaw
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
What happens when a museum stops pretending to be above the world and starts behaving like part of it? Arts of the Earth at the Guggenheim Bilbao gets its hands dirty enough to suggest that even greenwashing can, occasionally, grow something real. writes Victoria Comstock-Kershaw.
There’s a moment walking into Arts of the Earth when the Guggenheim Bilbao stops feeling like a titanium spaceship and starts feeling like a test plot. The usual smooth, photogenic circulation is interrupted by mounds of grass, clots of clay, vitrines fogged with their own microclimates, the damp, slightly sweet smell of soil. It’s still a museum, of course - there are wall texts, sightlines, bucket-list artists - but the building has been reprogrammed as something closer to a greenhouse or a research farm: a place where things are grown, monitored, and sometimes allowed to die.
Curated by Manuel Cirauqui, Arts of the Earth proposes the museum as an experiment in what he calls “museum agricultures”: he argues that museums should understand themselves more as living agro-ecosystems instead of neutral warehouses, places to prototype new ways of organising materials, energy and care rather than just staging images of environmental concern. “Culture,” here, is taken literally: cultura as in cultivation, as the work of tending a plot over time. The exhibition’s big, unfashionably sincere claim is that art can no longer pretend to be outside the metabolic systems that sustain it: energy, labour, soil, water, shipping, air.
This isn’t, in itself, a new idea. The show’s historical spine - Land Art, Arte Povera, eco-conceptualism - is familiar enough. We pass through Dubuffet’s crusted matter, Joseph Beuys’s pedagogical forests, Ana Mendieta’s earth-bodies, Giuseppe Penone’s arboreal poetics, the usual pantheon of men and (a few) women who put dirt and rocks into the white cube in the 1960s and ’70s. But the exhibition refuses to leave them in the safety of the past. Instead, they’re treated as prototypes; early tests in a longer, still-unresolved process of rethinking how culture might be composed with, rather than merely about, the Earth.
Crucially, the “with” is not metaphorical. Soil is the central medium here, not just as texture or colour but as a living infrastructure. Asad Raza’s Root Sequence. Mother Tongue (a grid of trees living in modular planters) turns one gallery into a temporary forest nursery. The trees will be replanted in the Basque landscape once the show closes, completing a loop from site to museum and back again. Delcy Morelos’s compacted earth environments operate as an atmosphere rather than as a sculpture: a dense, enclosing presence that gets into your lungs and clothes. Gabriel Chaile’s adobe ovens hum with a kind of proto-industrial warmth. Everything sits on top of, or inside of, something that once grew.
That attention to where things come from and where they end up extends, unusually, to the exhibition’s own skeleton. Much is made of the show’s sustainability protocols, and not just in the footnotes. Notably, no air freight: works were shipped by land and sea. Many of the display structures are made from recycled or compostable materials. Living works are housed in the carefully calculated microclimates of Wardian botanical cases and humidity-controlled enclosures that make visible the usually invisible systems keeping art alive. Conservation is partly done remotely, via virtual condition checks, cutting the carbon cost of flying specialists around the world.
You can, of course, roll your eyes at this. The Guggenheim Bilbao is not a modest rural art space but a symbol of late-20th-century cultural capitalism: a piece of Frank Gehry-branded infrastructure that helped inaugurate the very regime of global art tourism whose emissions everyone is now scrambling to offset. The show is sponsored by Iberdrola, an energy giant whose corporate slogan about “building a better future through electrification” echoes, a little too smoothly, the exhibition’s own language of “hopeful tools” and “new beginnings.” The press materials are perfumed with ESG-speak. It would be easy to file the whole thing under Greenwashing 2.0 and move on.
But there’s a case to be made for a more generous reading; for what we might call positive greenwashing. Not because the contradictions disappear (they don’t), but because Arts of the Earth treats those contradictions as material to work with rather than a PR stain to be scrubbed out.
Giuseppe Penone, Fingernail and Laurel Leaves (Unghia e foglie di alloro), 1989, Claudia Alarcón, When the fabric manifests itself, 2024
First, there’s the specificity of place. This is not a generic “planetary” show; it’s rooted, literally, in the Basque Country. Local clays and silts appear throughout, including mud from the river Nervión. Ethnographic objects from beehives and agricultural tools to talismanic implements and plants share space with global contemporary artworks. The effect is not a cosy “local colour” add-on; there's a genuine insistence that any talk of “the Earth” has to pass through particular soils, particular histories of land use and extraction. Iberdrola’s electricity grid, in that sense, is simply another layer in the palimpsest: one more infrastructure to acknowledge and, where possible, redirect.
Second, the show doesn’t fetishise late-stage eco-anxiety as an image. It chooses instead to experiment (very succesfully) with the institution’s actual operating system. A lot of “green” exhibitions amount to photographs of melting ice and LED lights in the shop. Here, the sustainability protocols feel proportionate to the rhetoric. No air freight is not a sexy phrase, but it’s a real structural change. Compostable and reusable display structures, like their bioplastic curtain dividers, also materially alter how future shows can be built. Once a museum has proved to its insurers, lenders, and nervous registrars that it can do remote condition checks without disaster, that precedent exists and it becomes harder to argue for flying people around the world for every crate. This is what I mean by positive greenwashing: the rhetoric is being used to push through infrastructural shifts that might otherwise be blocked.
The third (and maybe most interesting) layer is temporal. Arts of the Earth is obsessed with duration: cycles of growth and decay, the time it takes for a tree to establish, the slow work of erosion, the bureaucratic time of loans and contracts. Many of the works are explicitly finite. Raza’s trees leave. Living elements wilt without maintenance. Clay cracks in humidity. Against the museum’s usual fantasy of timelessness, the exhibition proposes a compost-time: things are meant to change, and their change leaves residues that nourish something else. When a major institution adopts that logic, even partially, it nudges its own self-image away from the mausoleum model (collect, entomb, preserve forever) toward something more experimental and risky.
Underpinning this approach is a quiet but firm rejection of what might be called the Planet B imaginary. Arts of the Earth resists the fantasy common to both techno-optimism and certain strands of eco-art - the "high frontier" evoked by Gerard K. O’Neill and the L5 Society in the exhibition's extremely fine catalogue essay Wet Mud by Berta Gutiérrez - that environmental collapse might be solved elsewhere: by planetary expansion, off-world extraction, or speculative escape. Here, there is no second Earth waiting in the wings. The exhibition insists instead on radical immanence: whatever futures we imagine must be built from the soils, infrastructures, and limits already in front of us. Cultivation, not transcendence, becomes the operative model. We see this in Oscar Santillán’s Planetarium series: mounted on the walls (his gallerist jokes over drinks about the idea of bringing in his personal telescope and installing it as part of the show) like devotional objects, his ceramic vessels reproduce the chemical composition of the surface soils of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon. Planetary bodies so often invoked as sites of future extraction or escape are here rendered in clay: fired, fragile, and emphatically Earth-made.
The exhibition’s dialogue between canonical eco-art and vernacular material culture is not always comfortable, but that discomfort feels intentional. The risk, of course, is aestheticisation: artefacts drained of context and pressed into service as atmospheric texture, but Arts of the Earth largely avoids this by foregrounding material specificity over symbolic equivalence. A lump of Nervión river mud does not “stand for” ecology; it indexes a particular waterway, a history of industrial contamination and recovery, a local politics of land and labour. Similarly, Susana Mejía’s Color Amazonia pins fifteen sheets of pith paper dyed with Amazonian plant pigments into something like a chromatic herbarium; Unión Textiles Semillas’s collective installation La crecida que sana (“The Healing Flood”) braids llama fibre, chaguar and cotton into a cascade of woven panels that literally carry the techniques and stories of women weavers from northern Argentina; and Isa Melsheimer’s concrete-and-glass Wardian Cases quietly nurse miniature plant communities in their own sealed microclimates, a suite of small, breathing infrastructures inside Gehry’s titanium shell. The art is, dare I say, good.
Of course, none of this absolves Iberdrola, or the Guggenheim, of broader questions about energy, extraction, and capital. The company’s investment in renewables doesn’t erase the politics of its dams or its shareholder structures, and the museum’s willingness to green its operations doesn’t undo the fact that Bilbao’s “miracle” was built on a particular development regime that displaced other possibilities. But perhaps expecting absolution is the wrong frame. The more interesting question is: what kinds of experiments become possible when money goes green?
In Arts of the Earth, the answer is unusually convincing not because it hides the seams, but because it keeps pointing back to them. The museum is, briefly, trying to live within the limits it so eloquently names. If this is greenwashing, then it is at least washing the right thing: if the Guggenheim Bilbao wants to spend Iberdrola’s marketing budget on trialling lower-carbon shipping routes and compostable plinths, on importing fewer works and more mud, then I’m inclined to let it, especially when the works themselves are so good. The art world is not short on hypocrisy, but it is desperately short on prototypes.
Photography courtesy of Fetch London
When all is said and done, the show reads like a genuine step in the right direction. Certain pairings feel overly didactic; the museum can only ever simulate agriculture: nobody is actually feeding themselves off these plots. But when I overhear Mel Chin and Asad Raza talking about how they can't wait for their children and grandchildren to revisit the country in a few decades and see Raza's trees, I can't help but think of a different kind of nourishment. The task, for museums, is no longer to represent the Earth from a distance but to let their infrastructures be softened, dirtied, and re-seeded. Arts of the Earth shows what it looks like when a major institution starts, however cautiously and contradictorily, to get its hands dirty.
Arts of the Earth shows from the 5th of December 2025 to the 3rd of May 2026.
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based arts journalist, reviewer and critic.