The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant
The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
February 28 – May 10, 2026
We like to prescribe conditionality to things that exist in relation to each other by highlighting the likes and differences that exist in artworks and the concepts that drive them. The shorthand for this is curation, although the pedagogy of curation usually points to the assumption that knowledge flows in one direction: from the institution to the visitor. It is a pedagogy that presumes its own completeness; it knows what the objects mean, and its job is to transmit that meaning efficiently and categorically. The question this exhibition implicitly poses to its institutional context is: what would it mean to curate without claiming to know?
Relationality (or as Édouard Glissant called it, la Relation) is the idea that identity is created through encounter, contact, and exchange. This is not just a sociological observation but a metaphysical claim: being itself is relational. We exist as whole beings, shaped by our personal histories, experiences, and surroundings. To try to imprint universality is an attempt to flatten ideas and identities into something less than what could be created without explicit intent. For Glissant, the curator is not the conductor of an orchestra but more like a gardener or a host; they provide the ground and the conditions for something unpredictable and possibly more significant than what could be anticipated.
The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant, currently on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), is an exhibition that has traveled from Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo and organized around Glissant’s idea of la parole du paysage, the word of the landscape and the landscape of the word, where landscape is not backdrop but an active, speaking force that shaped the artists who made these works. This is not a thematic argument in the traditional sense in that it doesn’t make a statement about landscape; rather, it creates a conceptual atmosphere within which the works can be encountered. The visitor is not told what to think; they are given a mode of attention. Traditional exhibitions cast the viewer as a passive participant, while an exhibition organized around relation casts the viewer as active. They are free to create their own frameworks based on the aspects they themselves bring to the exhibit. The work does not mean the same thing to everyone, and that is not a problem to be solved, but the condition of a genuine relation.
The works in the three galleries at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) resist any single logic of arrangement, which is precisely the point. Gerardo Chávez’s untitled oil-on-wood from 1978 and Eduardo Zamora’s Los Amantes 2 (The Lovers 2) from 1987 hang in proximity: one made by a Peruvian artist who settled in Paris, one by a Mexican artist who studied in Kraków, with no curatorial note pointing to their resonance. Yet they mirror each other unmistakably: the visual velocity, the hatched lines, the figures caught in scenes of violence and dream. The discovery is left entirely to the viewer. This is la parole du paysage working at the level of the installation itself; landscape not as geography but as the field of encounter within which meaning becomes possible, unannounced and uncommanded. This is precisely what the Biennial format cannot accommodate.
The exhibition is positioned as an antidote to the sprawling organizational principles that Biennials are centered around. Glissant argues a distinction between mondialisation (economic standardization) and mondialité (world mentality/relation). The biennial has been described as the cultural expression of globalization itself, its proliferation closely tied to the realities of neoliberal expansion. This is not incidental. The Biennial emerged as a format precisely when globalization was reorganizing the world economy, and it served as globalization’s cultural arm.
The Venice Biennale is the clearest example. Founded in 1895, it was organized around national pavilions, each nation presenting its artists as representatives of a national culture. This is universalism structured as competition: all nations are equal in principle, but some nations have better pavilions, more prestigious positions in the Giardini, and more institutional resources behind their artists. The format performs inclusion while encoding hierarchy. In Glissantian terms, it is precisely mondialisation dressed as mondialité, the appearance of global encounter masking the continued dominance of Western centers.
There have been attempts to break from this model: the Havana Biennial refused to subscribe to the notion that non-Western art had remained untouched by Western modernity. It instead attempted to address multiple modernities emerging on the global periphery, setting itself apart from both the Western desire for authentic art and from anti-colonial projects that catered to identity politics-based notions of indigenous art untouched by the West. And the rise of biennials in Cairo, Dakar, and Sydney took on an inverse logic; rather than looking to Western metropolitan centers to set the agenda, they developed a logic of proximate relationships that eluded absolute circumscription by market forces and those who possess discursive authority, bringing new critical pressure on institutions like Venice and Documenta to renovate. Yet even at their most progressive, these biennials remain organized around contemporaneity and global aggregation — reforming the model without escaping its structural logic.
Against all of this, The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds exhibition operates on entirely different structural principles. While the biennial model centers itself around contemporaneity, the Glissant exhibition is organized around a collection assembled over sixty years through personal relationships and intellectual friendship. Time operates differently in that these works are not competing for relevance in the present moment but exist in a durational relationship with each other alongside a body of thought.
Where the Biennial aggregates works from around the world to produce a picture of global art, the Glissant exhibition presents works that were already in relation before they entered any institutional space, gathered not by a curator exercising selection power but by a philosopher pursuing intellectual dialogue. The curatorial gesture is one of accompaniment rather than assembly. Where the Biennial produces a thesis or a survey, this exhibition produces a space of tremblement: genuinely open, genuinely incomplete, organized around concepts that generate questions rather than deliver answers. And where the Biennial is fixed to a place and a moment, this exhibition is itself practicing errantry, traveling between São Paulo and New York and presumably beyond, changing in each context, refusing the authority of any single location or institutional framework.
At the 2003 Venice Biennale, Glissant collaborated with Hans Ulrich Obrist to create Utopia Station, an attempt to introduce a Glissantian logic into the heart of the Biennial world. Its open, conversational, non-spectacular form was structurally incompatible with the Biennial’s economy of attention, and it remained marginal within Venice as a result. In retrospect, it was an early attempt to do within the Biennial framework what the current touring exhibition does outside it, and the contrast speaks directly to the incompatibility between the Biennial model and Glissantian relationality.
The comparison between an exhibition organized around mondialité and one organized around mondialisation is a way to historicize and contextualize what the Glissant exhibition is doing. It is not positioned as a minor show on the margins of the art world but as a deliberate alternative to the dominant exhibition model of the last thirty years. The Biennial promised to decolonize the museum by going global. What it actually delivered, in most cases, was globalization in curatorial form — the same pedagogical and market logic operating at a larger scale and with more diverse content. The Glissant exhibition does not go global. It goes errant. And that is a fundamentally different proposition.
In this limited space, I cannot claim to present Glissant’s vision completely or correctly, but instead offer a single situated, errant encounter in a specific city, at a specific moment, from a specific position. The exhibition at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York is not the exhibition in São Paulo. It is a different island in the archipelago. And that difference is not incidental; it is the philosophy made material. The artworks are evidence not just of Glissant’s aesthetic sensibility but of a curatorial philosophy that refuses to resolve them into illustration, that keeps them intact while placing them in relation.