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

Edited by Paulo Miyada and Ana Roman

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant is the first publication to present Glissant’s art collection and project for a museum of memory-in-transit.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous touring exhibition and titled after Glissant’s poetic anthology, La Terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents (2010), this major publication offers a polyphonic extension of Glissant’s foundational thinking on art to museology, philosophy, and poetry. Errantry, in Glissant’s thought, is a practice of relation, of rejecting fixed affiliations and singular points of origin. The Museum of Errantry attests to his conception of the museum itself as an archipelago—a space open to ruptures, disappearances, and reinventions without forced synthesis.

The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds features an expansive curatorial essay by Ana Roman and Paulo Miyada, as well as detailed artist entries, archival fragments, and visual documents to illuminate the many relational, diasporic, migratory trajectories—across languages, landscapes, geographies, and histories—that inform Glissant’s collection and meditations. The volume also features never-before-published excerpts from L’Abécédaire d’Édouard Glissant (2008), a long-form recorded dialogue between the author and acclaimed Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau that unfolds key concepts such as archipelago, creolization, and errantry, as well as a facsimile of Notebook of a Journey on the Nile (1988), a poetic-philosophical travelogue composed during a felucca trip through Egypt.