This exhibition is a highlight of the France-Brazil Season and the result of remarkable research by the curatorial team at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, an art center in São Paulo. The Martiniquais thinker Edouard Glissant (1928-2011) was not strictly a collector, but his journey alongside artists led him to assemble a highly personal collection. After his death in 2011, it was transferred to a Caribbean institution, as he had wished. The Mémorial ACTe, inaugurated in 2015 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, now houses this ensemble of around 115 pieces, nearly half of which are on view in this exhibition, titled "La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents: Pour un musée de l'errance avec Glissant" ("Earth, Fire, Water, and Winds: For a Museum of Wandering with Glissant"). The collection also contains Amerindian and African objects, but this exhibit focuses solely on the artworks assembled by the man who is now widely cited and recognized, particularly within the art world.

"He had a relationship with all these artists – they were his friends, and their works nourished and accompanied his thought," said Sylvie Séma Glissant, his widow. "And it is only now that we are coming to understand that one way of reading Glissant is to do so through these presences, all these relationships woven with these aesthetics, these imaginations, these visions – what these artists bring and say about the world. That is fully part of his poetic thought." Glissant's thought, indeed, is a poetic system rather than a philosophical one. "He was above all a poet, even when he wrote essays. If we read his essays without first entering into this poetic perspective, access to them is difficult," she emphasized.

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