Melvin Edwards's group exhibition, The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil, will be on view September 3, 2025–January 25, 2026.
The Instituto Tomie Ohtake's press release follows:
The Ministry of Culture , through the Federal Law for Cultural Incentive (Lei Rouanet), and the Tomie Ohtake Institute present the exhibition The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds – Towards a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant. Conceived as a museum in motion and dedicated to the work and thought of the Martinican poet, philosopher and essayist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), the exhibition is one of the main highlights of the France-Brazil Season 2025.
With its title inspired by the poetry anthology *La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents * (2010), organized by the Martinican writer, the exhibition explores what a “Museum of Errantry” would be. Errantry is an experience of Relationship: it rejects unique affiliations and proposes the museum as an archipelago – a space of ruptures, erasures, and reinventions without forced synthesis. Against rigid genealogies, it proposes a memory in transit, made of provisional alliances, translations, and tremors – an institutional process driven by the encounter between times, territories, and languages. Although Glissant left fragments of his vision for a 21st-century museum, he did not manage to realize it.
The exhibition imagines what this Museum of Errantry could be like, with multiple layers and unexpected connections between works, documents, and landscapes. The two key ideas in organizing the exhibition's layout are the word of the landscape and the landscape of the word, conceived from Glissant's concept of "parole du paysage" (word of the landscape). For the poet, the landscape is not merely an external setting, but an active force that shapes memories, gestures, and languages.
Furthermore, other ideas such as Everyone, creolization, archipelago, tremor, opacity, landscape word, and here-there are present in the author's phrases, manuscripts, and interviews . It is an arc of interconnected subjects with profound relevance in the contemporary world, which once again finds itself permeated by discourses and measures of intolerance towards diversity and incapable of creating channels for listening to natural elements and landscapes threatened with destruction.
It is within this context that part of the personal collection assembled by Glissant and currently preserved at the Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe is presented for the first time in Brazil. The collection includes paintings, sculptures, and prints by artists with whom the thinker associated and about whom he wrote, such as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Agustín Cárdenas, Antonio Seguí, Enrique Zañartu, José Gamarra, Victor Brauner, and Victor Anicet, among others. These are artists of growing international recognition who lived through trajectories of diaspora and immigration, and produced work in transit between languages, landscapes, and multiple histories.
The collection of works is complemented by documents, notebooks, videos, and fragments of texts and interviews by Glissant, all previously unpublished. The exhibition also presents excerpts from the extensive interview given in 2008 to Patrick Chamoiseau, a Martinican writer and intellectual partner of Glissant, which resulted in the monumental Abécédaire .
This extensive and rich collection is presented in dialogue with works by more than 30 contemporary artists from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia, inviting the public to experience, in a sensory way, the intertwining of landscape, language, and memory.
