The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant

As part of Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s long-term research on memory-making practices, the exhibition builds upon recent initiatives such as Towards the Museum of Origins (2023) and the seminar Towards the Museum of Origins – Politics of Memory (2024), which brought together museum professionals, archival institutions, and communities in wide-ranging debates on preservation and citizenship.

Taking its title from Glissant’s poetic anthology La Terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents (2010), the exhibition rehearses what a “Museum of Errantry” could be. Errantry, in Glissant’s thought, is a practice of Relation: it rejects fixed affiliations and conceives the museum as an archipelago—a space open to ruptures, disappearances, and reinventions without forced synthesis. Against rigid genealogies, it proposes a memory-in-transit—built on provisional alliances, translations, and tremors—an institutional process fueled by encounters between times, territories, and languages. Although Glissant left scattered insights into what a 21st-century museum could be, he did not concretize this vision. The curators imagine what such a Museum of Errantry might look like through an exhibition composed of multiple layers and unexpected connections between artworks, documents, and landscapes. Two key concepts organize the exhibition display: the word of the landscape and the landscape of the word, both drawn from Glissant’s notion of la parole du paysage. As the curators write, “In the first case, territory infiltrates language; in the second, language expands into space, transforming signs, letters, and codes into terrain, weather, or current.” For Glissant, landscape is not mere background but an active force shaping memory, gesture, and speech.

Throughout the exhibition, the public will encounter other foundational concepts of Glissant’s work—Tout-monde, creolization, archipelago, tremor, opacity, word of the landscape, and here-there (ici-là)—quoted in texts, manuscripts, and interviews. For the curators, who developed the exhibition in close dialogue with Sylvie Séma Glissant, these are interrelated themes with urgent resonance in the contemporary world, where diversity is once again threatened by narratives of intolerance and the destruction of natural landscapes and elements.

Within this horizon, the exhibition presents, for the first time in Brazil, part of Glissant’s personal collection, now preserved at the Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe. The group includes paintings, sculptures, and prints by artists Glissant was close to or wrote about—such as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Agustín Cárdenas, Antonio Seguí, Enrique Zañartu, José Gamarra, Victor Brauner, Victor Anicet, among others. These are internationally recognized artists whose trajectories were shaped by diaspora and migration, producing in movement across languages, geographies, and histories. Their work explores figuration, writing, and symbolism as sites of memory, identity, and invention.

Complementing this collection are documents, notebooks, videos, and excerpts from Glissant’s texts and interviews—many never previously exhibited. A highlight is the facsimile of his Journal d’un voyage sur le Nil (1988), which expands beyond a travel diary into a poetic-philosophical exercise in which Glissant rejects the idea of a singular origin and proposes a vision of multiple origins. The show also includes excerpts from the Abécédaire, the extensive filmed conversation between Glissant and fellow Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, recorded in 2008. Seventeen entries selected by the curators will be shown across six monitors throughout the exhibition, revealing how Glissant’s ideas emerged at the intersection of writing, orality, and image.