KURA is a site-specific land art installation at La Nave Va, an open-air sculpture park in the rural landscape of Extremadura, Spain. It explores the relationship between body, territory and ecological processes.

The proposal consisted of using natural elements – straw, earth, stones and seeds of native plants – to build a piece that could work simultaneously as an amphitheater, a garden and as a place to walk through the landscape and to experiment art.

The project was developed by visual artists Kika Goldstein and Kmilo Morales together with landscape architect and artist Ismael Pizarro Muñoz, and curated by Andrey Brito with the support of Pepe Pisa. References drawn from the artists’ own trajectories across Brazil, Cuba, France, Mexico, Malaysia, Sweden, and north and south of Spain, and from conversations about materials, processes and around the Yoruba orixás associated with movement, healing and cyclical transformation.

Visitors are invited to pass through a narrow corridor formed by two curving straw walls, which compresses the sense of space before opening into a wider gathering area. A small opening cut into the first wall, originally meant to relieve wind pressure, ends up framing a centuries-old olive tree. Inside the straw, sound is muffled and temperature more even. Stepping back out, visitors face an old holm oak. The second wall settles into a shallow amphitheater, folded into the walking route as a place to stop and gather.

This wall was also thought to be a living wall. At the inauguration, which coincided with the spring equinox, participants sowed native wildflower and grassland species, such as Centaurea cyanus, Papaver rhoeas, and Plantago lanceolata, directly into its straw structure. To close the semi-circular form into a full circle, the surrounding meadow was deliberately left unmowed. Over time, this uncut meadow became a drought garden shaped by ecological succession, the site for the project’s botany-focused activities.

At night, the enclosure becomes a place to watch stars, constellations, and especially the Milky Way Galaxy, and to experiment with long-exposure and light-painting photography.

KURA is meant to keep living and changing through weather, growth and the people who experience it. A monthly program of workshops, gatherings, performances and research exchanges will keep the site active, with artists, local communities and visitors.

At a moment increasingly defined by socioecological uncertainty, the project offers a threshold to walk through, a space to encounter, and a sense that healing, like landscape, doesn’t happen all at once – it happens slowly over time.