The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds

This spring, CARA presents The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant—the first US exhibition of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s (1928–2011) personal art collection.

Traveling from Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil, The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds reveals a lesser-known dimension of Glissant’s life: his vision for a museum. He conceived of it not as a monument, but as a space capable of holding art, memories, and intertwined histories without reducing them to colonial frameworks.

Errantry, central to Glissant’s thinking and this vision for a museum, is movement, encounter, and reinvention. It unfolds through the crossing of borders—geographic, linguistic, and historic—and resists the pull toward singular origins or stories. Glissant imagined both the world and the museum as an archipelago: a constellation of islands that live side by side, exchanging while remaining distinct.

Assembled across six decades, Glissant’s personal art collection traces both the beginnings of this museum and the breadth of his intellectual friendships and collaborations. In post-occupation France, particularly through the Surrealist scene and Galerie du Dragon (1955–95), Glissant encountered artists from Africa, Europe, and the Americas who approached art as a journey of displacement, renewal, and solidarity. He gathered these works not for ownership, but in the spirit of the commons, imagining them as the beginnings of a living archive attentive to relation and difference. 

Artists on view include Victor Anicet, Victor Brauner, Ernest Bréleur, Agustín Cárdenas, Gerardo Chávez, Manthia Diawara, Melvin Edwards, M. Emile, Öyvind Fahlström, José Gamarra, Sylvie Séma Glissant, Serge Hélénon, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Paul Mayer, Gabriela Morawetz, Irving Petlin, Cesare Peverelli, Pancho Quilici, Antonio Seguí, Eduardo  Zamora, and Enrique Zañartu. These artists embrace landscape not as a background but as an active force shaping gesture and memory, similar to Glissant’s conception of la parole du paysage, or “the word of the landscape.”

A publication of the same name accompanies the exhibition, offering numerous points of entry into Glissant’s thinking and collecting. Edited by Ana Roman and Paulo Miyada, the volume gathers essays, archival fragments, visual documents, and artist entries that trace the diasporic, migratory, and relational trajectories present in the works. It includes never-before-published excerpts from L’Abécédaire d’Édouard Glissant (2008), his recorded dialogue with Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as well as a facsimile of Notebook of a Journey on the Nile (1988), a poetic-philosophical travelogue composed during his journey through Egypt.

Glissant’s work reckons with the long afterlives of colonization by attending to the poetics, experiences, and discourses of Black life in the Caribbean. From the landscapes of Martinique, he developed the theory of the Tout-Monde, a world shaped by relation, intersecting geographies, histories, and temporalities. For Glissant, all forms of knowledge are entangled, including those held in the textures of a poem, the histories of an acoma tree, and the languages and sensibilities embedded in works of art.

From Martinique to Paris, New York, and beyond, the writer’s migratory life shaped this vision. CARA’s presentation of the exhibition marks one iteration in a broader journey of errantry, attuned to and speaking from the context of New York City.

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant at CARA is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive and Artistic Director, with curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky, in collaboration with Paulo Miyada, Artistic Director, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, and Ana Roman, Artistic Superintendent, Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The exhibition is co-conceived with Mémorial ACTe, the Édouard Glissant Art Fund, and the Institut du Tout-Monde.

Public programs
The project draws its title from La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents (2010), a poetic anthology edited by Édouard Glissant. One of the writer’s final publications, it acts as a distillation of his web of references, a weaving of the Toute-Monde.

Accompanying the exhibition, a series of public programs considers this title as a prompt for collaboration. Each program invites one artist to conjure with the elements, charting poetic responses to earth, fire, water, and winds with their own communities and collaborators. 

With earth we consider landscape, geography, histories, territory, roots. Fire: change, fuel, reaction, risk, revolution. Water: diaspora, fluidity, creolization, migration. Winds: breath, dispersal, the unseen, translation. 

The programs will feature poetry, performances, and conversations with interlocutors such as renowned writer, filmmaker, and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara, who was a close friend of Glissant.

Press inquiries: Sam Riehl, Head of Communications, sam@cara-nyc.org.