{"id":332352,"date":"2026-03-10T21:49:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/332352\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T21:49:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:49:23","slug":"the-earth-the-fire-the-water-and-the-winds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/332352\/","title":{"rendered":"The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds \t
\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n

The first US exhibition of \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s personal art collection is fertile landscape for thinking through the poetics of relation.<\/p>\n

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The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, installation view. Courtesy CARA. Photo: Kris Graves.<\/p>\n

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, curated by Manuela Moscoso with Marian Chudnovsky, Paulo Miyada, and Ana Roman, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), 225 West Thirteenth Street, New York City,
through May 10, 2026<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n

Has anyone had as much influence on the art world in recent memory as \u00c9douard Glissant? The Martinican poet and philosopher\u2019s ideas surfaced among contemporary artists and curators in the 1990s\u2014parallel to the rise of global capitalism and its attendant movements of people and commodities over lately (if inconsistently) porous borders; parallel to the expansion of the international art biennial; parallel to the opportunities and crises that this new world order delivered. And why not? He theorized not just postcolonial or decolonial but also counter-colonial forms of relation, in which history\u2019s violences and injustices frame novel modes of encounter where individual sovereignty is paramount and only ensured by both a recognition of and a respect for diversity.<\/p>\n

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Jos\u00e9 Gamarra, L\u2019inaccessible . . . (The inaccessible . . . ), 1986\u201387. \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s personal collection. Courtesy M\u00e9morial ACTe.<\/p>\n

He was saying what cultural producers needed to hear in the face of the homogenization that neoliberalism sought to impose, and, in the West, an art world grappling with an accelerated multiculturalism. It has remained no less relevant in the decades since, with rising global fascism and waves of forced migration. Glissant spoke of the archipelago (collectives made of discrete parts that function without losing their distinctiveness), opacity (the right to not translate oneself into the terms of the dominant power or discourse), creolization (the unpredictable melding of cultures, histories, landscapes, and temporalities that creates new, and unfixed, formations; a fundamental instrument of world-building)\u2014and now we do, too.<\/p>\n

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The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, installation view. Courtesy CARA. Photo: Kris Graves.<\/p>\n

Glissant began developing his theory of Caribbean culture in the 1950s, in dialogue with intellectuals including Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Frantz Fanon, and L\u00e9on Damas. He saw that culture as inextricably tied to other parts of the world, because it bore the traces of colonialism, the Middle Passage, the plantation economy, the movements of indentured labor, Indigenous pasts and presents, and so on. Because it contained the whole world in its ambit, Caribbean culture, in Glissant\u2019s view, was neither an anthropological fact nor a historical phenomenon but a method\u2014a way of imagining solidarity across chasms of difference. It is not surprising that art played a role in his thinking. He wrote about painting and sculpture extensively, especially that of the international roster of artists who gathered at the Galerie de Dragon in Paris (1955\u20131995). He amassed a significant collection during his peripatetic life (he lived in Paris and the US in addition to his time in the islands). He was invited by former French president Jacques Chirac to envision a center dedicated to the memory of slavery and its abolition\u2014a vision that would inform the establishment of M\u00e9morial ACTe in Guadeloupe in 2015\u2014and he dreamt of creating another: the Martinican Museum of the Arts of the Americas, a project that remained unfinished at the time of his death in 2011.<\/p>\n

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The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, installation view. Courtesy CARA. Photo: Kris Graves. Pictured, center left: Pancho Quilici, Untitled, 1985.<\/p>\n

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For A Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, now on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), is the first US exhibition of his personal art collection. But it is so much more than that\u2014it offers insight into Glissant\u2019s understanding of how artworks relate to each other, and how we might relate to them, and to one another. The show originated in S\u00e3o Paulo, at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, where it was significantly larger, and, in addition to pieces Glissant encountered in his lifetime, included the work of several contemporary artists impacted by his writings. But to call the New York iteration a truncated version would be to misunderstand what a \u201cmuseum of errantry\u201d might be: not encyclopedic, not chronological, not something that promotes a fixed vision of culture, not a monument to a past or a crystallization of a present or future, but a constantly shifting archive of encounters, relationships, of conversations, of communication across borders and language barriers, of movement that doesn\u2019t seek to claim territory. The title of the show is borrowed from one of Glissant\u2019s last books\u2014an anthology of fragments (C\u00e9saire, Rimbaud, Faulkner, MLK Jr., Cendrars, Amerindian chants) that he arranged into a montage; resonance, rather than theme, chronology, or any other organizing principle, guided their placement.<\/p>\n

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Enrique Za\u00f1artu, Untitled, illustrations for Les Indes (The Indies), by \u00c9douard Glissant, 1956. \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s personal collection. Courtesy of M\u00e9morial ACTe.<\/p>\n

Fifty-eight works by twenty-four artists (only two of them women, which tells you something about Glissant\u2019s collecting habits)\u2014now, for the most part, housed in the collection of M\u00e9morial ACTe\u2014are arranged in three galleries. Every time I tried to figure out a curatorial logic, I was thwarted. That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t plenty of threads that run through the show, but they, by design, can only be gleaned by moving from one gallery to another. Illustrations for Glissant\u2019s books\u2014Agust\u00edn C\u00e1rdenas\u2019s for Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Enrique Za\u00f1artu\u2019s for Les Indes (The Indies), Wifredo Lam\u2019s for La terre inqui\u00e8te (The Restless Earth), and Pancho Quilici\u2019s collage, which appeared on the cover of the novel Tout-Monde (Whole-World)\u2014are hung in different rooms. Landscape\u2014an important concept for Glissant, as it melded land, history, culture, and language outside of definitions of nation-state per se\u2014is visible everywhere, in surrealist, futurist, even video form. This is hardly the only possible trajectory: the female nude, disaster (slavery, sinking ships, war, fire), hybrid figures, collage\/assemblage, and so on are all ripe for consideration, along with many other things that haven\u2019t yet occurred to me.<\/p>\n

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Sylvie S\u00e9ma Glissant and \u00c9douard Glissant, Untitled, 2003. Ink on paper. Courtesy a private collection.<\/p>\n

Relationships are also everywhere\u2014not only Glissant\u2019s relationships with the artists (including his wife, Sylvie S\u00e9ma Glissant, whose 2003 ink drawings, inscribed with one of Glissant\u2019s poems in his own hand, is included in the show) but also the artists\u2019 with each other. The point is nicely underlined by the inclusion of Melvin Edwards\u2019s welded steel sculpture To Wifredo Lam (1982). And then there are the relationships that occur only through the proximity afforded by the gallery walls, as in the striking juxtaposition of Gerardo Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s untitled oil-on-wood piece from 1978 and Eduardo Zamora\u2019s oil-on-canvas Los amantes 2 (The Lovers 2), from 1987. Ch\u00e1vez was born in Peru and moved to Italy and then Paris in the 1960s at the suggestion of Roberto Matta, where he embarked on works like this one, in which figures with spears appear to have subdued a gigantic body in a chaotic battle. Zamora was born in Mexico, and studied in Krak\u00f3w before settling in Paris, where he made pictures that melded dreamlike figures in scenes that are both absurd and quotidian, revolving around the depiction of private life.<\/p>\n

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The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with \u00c9douard Glissant, installation view. Courtesy CARA. Photo: Kris Graves. Pictured, left foreground: Melvin Edwards, To Wifredo Lam, 1982. Center right, on right wall: Gerardo Ch\u00e1vez, Untitled, 1978; and Eduardo Zamora, Los Amantes 2 (The Lovers 2), 1987.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no real reason to hang them together\u2014they were produced in different contexts, at different times, with different subject matter\u2014except for the fact that they look so much alike. Not only because of their portrayals of violence\u2014the male lover in Zamora\u2019s image spews snakes from his mouth and runs at a similarly snake-spewing nude woman with a bat in his hand\u2014but because, too, of their use of dotted and hatched lines, their visual velocity, their palettes. No one pointed this out\u2014it was left for me to discover. And in the discovery, I was able to find new things in the works around me, some of which I embraced (the potential of the dreamlike to speak to the horrors of the present) and some of which I rejected (misogyny), but all of which left me feeling like I understood a little more about the world and its potential than I did before.<\/p>\n

Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/a> is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times, 4Columns, and Hyperallergic. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press in 2024.<\/p>\n

The first US exhibition of \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s personal art collection is fertile landscape for thinking through the poetics of relation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds Aruna D\u2019Souza The first US exhibition of \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[13685,13684,787,13689,437,434,435,436,9113,13687,1503,438,146,878,13686,85,46,1619,13688,409,13692,13690,1529,13691],"class_list":["post-332352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-4-columns","tag-4columns","tag-art","tag-art-criticism","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-contemporary-art","tag-critic","tag-culture","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-four-columns","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-magazine","tag-margaret-sundell","tag-music","tag-new-york-art","tag-publications","tag-review","tag-visual-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}