The Archipelago Conversations

“Encountering the French Carribean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant would forever mark the trajectory of the Swiss art historian and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who heads the Serpentine Galleries in London. Until Glissant’s death in 2011, Obrist interviewed him nine times. These interviews became part of Obrist’s colossal Interview Project, a living archive of around 4000 conversations and counting, and they were on display last year at Luma Arles in the south of France”

“these conversations highlight a shared belief that the exchange with the other can cause reciprocal change, and from thereon, conversation can be a means to produce new realities”

“A world in transformation, for Édouard Glissant, is an All-World that knows to listen and learn from each of its unique voices”

“His philosophy of Relation is rooted in the history and the geography of the Caribbean archipelagos that gave rise to a distinctly mixed Antillean identity”

“By favouring constant exchanges from one island to another, these archipelagos have provided the matrix for creolization, a process of continual fusion of languages and cultures that does not cause the loss of diversity, but enriches it through hybridizations”

“Glissant later observed that similar cultural blendings occur all over the globe and that « creolization is a process which never stops »”

“While continental thought relies on systems and claims the absoluteness of its own worldview, the archipelagic thought recognizes and furthers the world’s diversity”

“Glissant had realised early on the dangers of homogenizing globalization, the engine behind the disappearance of cultural, linguistic and ecological diversity, as well as the dangers of the populist counter-current to globalization, namely new forms of nationalism and localism that refuse solidarity”

“To resist globalization without denying globality, he coined the notion of Mondialité as a plea for a continuous worldwide dialogue that equally encouraged the mixing of cultures and celebration of local identities”

“As Glissant says, archipelagic thought teaches us that one can change through the exchange with the other, without losing or diluting one’s sense of self”

“So, Édouard, where do we start?”

“I would first of all like to say something about archipelagos. I think the idea of the archipelago — as a place where we can begin to understand and resolve the contradictions of the world — should be propagated. The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles”

“These archipelagos must encounter each other because, across their many islands, interdependence and difference coexist — and, in this way, they carry the energy that is necessary for our whole globe, our whole world”

“We might currently believe that this energy derives from military or economic force, but that is not so. It lies in the ideas and poetics of how we organize the world”

“Continents weigh us down. They are thick and sumptuous”

“Archipelagos are able to diffract, they create diversity and expansiveness, they are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real”

“Being in harmony with the world through archipelagos means inhabiting this diffraction, while still rallying coastlines and joining horizons. They open us to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting, which is not the same as futility”

“The community that we have before us is no longer my community or yours, it’s the community of the world”

“That’s what I call globality, mondialité.”

“There are separatist movements that give rise to globality. The indigenous people of Chiapas who fight for their recognition, they don’t want an indigenous Mexico, they want a creole, or mixed, Mexico, they want to be part of the mix. They want an archipelago, « a world of many worlds » in their own words”

“Creolization is the means by which several distinct cultures, or their elements, come into contact in a particular place in the world. It results in something unexpected, completely unpredictable, born out of the encounter of their heterogeneous elements”

“Creolization is necessary, we agree, because our actual world is a mixed one — it is entangled. The world is inextricable”

“At the same time, we need to confront a fact: our location is inescapable. Place is crucial. We are not floating in the air.”

“the world is in me and I am in the world. The world is mixed”

“Creolization, the hybridity of cultures and not only of organisms, is a métissage with a product inattendu — an unexpected result”

“Let’s take jazz music, for example. People created it, and all the music of the world altered it, rock ’n’ roll, etcetera, came from that. And this is an unexpected product of creolization”

“Creolization is not a state of identity. It is a process that never stops”

“In the Caribbean, in Brazil, you have creolization — cultures where elements from all over the world mix to create something unexpected — but not in the United States. What is the community that is the United States? The community exists in the Constitution, the flag, the Founding Fathers, and the President. That’s what links all these groups and, paradoxically, it’s an ideology of root identity. It does not enter into the infinite possibilities of Relation”

“Yes, a contact zone. A sort of daily vibration that makes it so that the languages that crop up, the Creoles that crop up, are very strong Creoles, but also very unpredictable, changing rapidly, like patois”

“I believe that architecture and language will be the two means of resistance in the future, of absolute invincible resistance”

“architecture has had a single commonality: the monument. The purpose of architecture has always been to show, to claim a space, and the monument is proof of that”

“Perhaps in our world today, our archipelagic world of relation and rhizomes, the basis and the role of architecture will no longer be to show the monument, but to show the invisible”

“The aesthetic of the invisible brings us back to the aesthetic of the void and the infinite, which need not produce anguish, but hope. That could be the new ambition of architecture”