Terraphilia: Beyond the Human in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid, Spain
1 July – 24 September 2025
If you are in Madrid, or planning a visit this month, I highly recommend the Terraphilia exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. By bringing together different disciplines and multiple works of art, it invites us to imagine new ways of living on Earth from a more holistic and hopeful perspective.
Curated by Daniela Zyman, the show takes a fresh approach: reinterpreting the museum’s collection and incorporating new works to propose alternative narratives about being in the world—through interspecies kinship, new collectivities, and planetary care.
Terraphilia—from the Greek philia (love) and Latin terra (Earth)—expresses an emotional, ethical, and spiritual connection with the planet.
The exhibition invites us to reimagine our place on the planet—not as sovereigns or observers, but as companions in a shared world. It proposes a cultural and political realignment beyond the human, opening paths for new ecological and planetary thinking. Such reimagining feels especially urgent in today’s political climate.
Here, ecological collapse is framed not only as an environmental crisis but also as a rupture in our shared ability to live together. Artists, poets, and philosophers reflect on this rupture: how symbols of salvation, like the ship, also carry histories of exclusion, empire, and exploitation. Yet through imagination, ritual, and remembrance, communities resist, reclaim, and remake their place in the planetary commons. Terraphilia is not just an idea—it is also a pedagogical tool, a political practice, and a poetic vision.
I will highlight just a few of my favourite works below.
At the entrance, Mexican artist Dr. Lakra presents Monomyths: sculptural and collage-based figures drawing from African, Asian, and Mesoamerican cosmologies. They stand as emissaries between worlds—human and non-human, visible and invisible—charged with spirituality and playful subversion. These figures are truly magical.
Dr. Lakra, ‘Monomitos’
The first room, The Animated Planet, embraces the idea of Earth as a dynamic, living system shaped by interaction between organisms, environments, and planetary forces. Life emerges not in isolation but through cooperation, symbiosis, and exchange—concepts present in both Indigenous cosmologies and contemporary science.
Highlights include Kandinsky’s painting, where organic forms suggest deep vitality. His abstract cosmos of fluctuating shapes and vibrant colours evokes spiritual and vital forces beyond appearances. Regina de Miguel’s Quimeric Proliferation imagines multispecies assemblages that blur boundaries between animal, fungal, mineral, and cosmic forms. Diana Policarpo’s 3D animation explores the chemical capacities of the ergot fungus—a parasite on rye capable of both healing and poisoning. I found myself fascinated by fungi when I read about them some time ago: neither plants nor animals, yet crucial for ecosystems through their hidden, underground networks.
Historical works such as Martin Johnson Heade’s Orchid and Hummingbird near a Waterfall highlight mutualistic relationships, while Charles Ephraim Burchfield’s “transcendental landscapes” imbue ordinary scenes with awe and spiritual wonder.
The art blueberry junto a pinturas de Charles Ephraim Burchfield
Another striking section, The Objective World, reflects on how modern science, rooted in Enlightenment ideals, dissected, mapped, and extracted nature—fuel for empire. While historical works show how tools of observation sought to render the world comprehensible and contained, I was more engaged by contemporary pieces challenging this legacy. Thomas Ruff’s Sterne series reclaims astronomical negatives, transforming data into cosmic enigmas. Olafur Eliasson’s New Berlin Sphere uses light and geometry to create a perceptual field in flux, disrupting the notion of objectivity as stable truth.
Later, we encounter nineteenth-century North American landscapes like Sundown in Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt, shaped by Manifest Destiny. These works depict land as empty, awaiting colonisation. In contrast, Brad Kahlhamer’s Billy Jack Jr. blends Indigenous iconography with contemporary language to explore identity and displacement. It challenges the idyllic landscape tradition by confronting the realities of those whose worlds were destroyed.
In the same room, Daniel Otero Torres’ totemic sculptures combine hyperrealist drawing with sculpture to honour marginalised communities, freedom fighters, and ancestral lands resisting colonialism and environmental exploitation. His work Hugs III shows intertwined bodies, symbolising cultural unity and the power of solidarity.
Among my favourites was Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa’s Deus ex machina. A suspended bronze branch recalls the theatrical trope of a god descending to resolve crisis. Here, masks referencing Guatemalan folklore gaze back at us, while a bird perches quietly. Natural, spiritual, and human elements combine to raise ecological consciousness by linking colonial trauma, resilience, and memory with environmental disruption.
The art blueberry junto a ‘Deus ex machina’ by Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa
Nearby, Hervé Yamguen’s Story of Heads 3 presents a bronze figure with multiple faces, confronting colonial violence in Cameroon. It reflects on cultural resilience and resistance, celebrating continuity of life and ancestral connection to the soil. The hollow forms and multiple mouths, noses, and eyes suggest fragmentation of identity, lost memory, and dispossession.
The following section, The Return of the Myth, explores moments when present structures falter. Myths appear not as relics, but as living narratives that unsettle, reconfigure, and renew. In Expulsion: Moon, Cole and Firelight, Thomas Cole depicts the biblical Fall, visualising the fracture between paradise and the fallen world. In contrast, the Mandala of Chakrasamvara unfolds as a tantric cosmogram, revealing divine union and the dissolution of dualities. At the centre, Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi embrace in sacred dance, symbolising compassion and insight—the tantric path to liberation.
Oceanic Cosmogonies considers creation stories rooted in water, motion, and interconnection. In Galatea, Gustave Moreau situates the sea-nymph between worlds, embodying desire, myth, and transformation. Carsten Höller’s Red Walrus presents a stranded pink synthetic body caught between extinction and artifice. At the back, Susanne Winterling’s Planetary Opera immerses viewers in a digital field of microalgae, blurring boundaries between deep sea, sky, and interstellar space.
The exhibition concludes by returning to The Animated Planet, where life flows across porous boundaries of species, elements, and forms. Georgia O’Keeffe’s White Iris No. 7 zooms into the flower, abstracting its form. This rendering of the organic world connects to Henri Bergson’s élan vital—the spirit animating life—which influenced O’Keeffe and her circle. Max Ernst’s Solitary and Conjugal Trees uses Surrealist techniques to explore thresholds between nature and dream. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s A Dream Dreaming a Dream immerses viewers in a digital jungle cosmos where human, animal, and spirit identities dissolve, shaped by Amerindian cosmogonies.
Lastly, Sissel Tolaas’ commissioned installation whereareWEarewhere permeates the exhibition through scent molecules from diverse landscapes, climates, and ecologies. Infused into olfactory vessels, they evoke themes of ocean, animal, human, stratosphere, and earth. By engaging smell—often overlooked in art—the work transforms the exhibition into a living, breathing body, making it a truly sensorial experience.
Through art, philosophy, and ancestral knowledge, Terraphilia reveals how love for the Earth can inspire justice, community, and care across species and time. The exhibition invites us to reimagine our place on the planet—not as sovereigns or distant observers, but as companions in a shared world. A more holistic and loving approach that opens the possibility of inhabiting the Earth with sensitivity and hope.
Leave a Reply