Exhibition views from Terrafilia,- Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, 2025 (Image by Maru Serrano).
TERRAPHILIA
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid
From July 1 to September 24, 2025
Diego Delas and Inês Zenha are participating in the group show Terraphilia at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with TBA21Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Terraphilia draws together around hundred works spanning five centuries from the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Carmen Thyssen and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collections.
Terraphilia —a term combining Terra (Earth) with philia (love and friendship)— expresses a deep-rooted connection of affect, care, and responsibility toward the Earth and its multitudes of inhabitants. To love the Earth is to pledge allegiance to animals, plants, geological formations, and supernatural creatures, as well as to rethink humanity's place within the complex, interwoven web of life. In the face of the mounting pressures of planetary heating, biodiversity loss, and increasing inequalities, the exhibition turns to art to envision and orient us toward transformative ways of being in the world, mobilizing interspecies kinship, new kinds of collectivities, and planetary care.
These works present an evocative spectrum of artistic and intellectual explorations, revealing the depth and reach of more-than-human stories and multispecies imaginaries. Resisting the entrenched dualism of modern cosmology, rooted in the separation between the social and the natural, the exhibition invites viewersthrough the lens of artists across generations and diverse traditionsto encounter the world as a pluriverse: a world of many worlds. Terraphilia also signals a decisive departure from anthropocentric and Western-centric perspectives, embracing an emerging planetary politics. In doing so, it aligns with recent philosophical, anthropological, ethical, and legal turns that advocate for the recognition of non-human life and geological and biological entities as participants in a planetary multitude.
Structured across seven interlinked "scenarios," the exhibition traverses themes such as cosmograms, animate worlds, the art of dreams, objectivity, land relations, mythical time, and oceanic cosmogonies. These thematic currents guide visitors through different ways of engaging with the Earth—via myth, science, dreams, stories, spirituality, and ecology—while critically interrogating the histories of colonial expansion, resource extraction, and ecological violence that have shaped the current planetary crisis.
Curator: Daniela Zyman.
More information on Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21-Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.
[1] Exhibition views from Terraphilia. Image by TBA21 / Francis Tsang. [2] Exhibition views from Terraphilia. Image by TBA21 /Manu Serrano. [3] Portrait by Diego Delas in the exhibition Terraphilia. Image by TBA21 / Manu Serrano.
