Over the past three decades, Édouard Glissant's key terms (Relation, opacity, creolization, the archipelagic) have travelled with striking ease through the world of contemporary art, shaping biennials, museum collections, and curatorial statements. This talk asks what happens to this vocabulary as it moves. Glissant's terms are forged from the specific political, historical, and ecological conditions of Martinique. Yet it is precisely their elasticity, their capacity to resettle almost anywhere, that has made them so appealing to a globalizing art world, and so vulnerable to becoming shorthand for difference and connection in the abstract. Taking Glissant's own late concept of the common-place (lieu-commun) as both a critical lens and a method, this talk turns to three artists who engage his thought quite differently: Alberta Whittle, Julien Creuzet, and Blue Curry. Reading these practices against Glissant's own reception in recent exhibition history, the talk asks what it might mean for art history to think at the scale of the world while remaining answerable to the places through which that world is imagined.

Image caption: Julien Creuzet, Attila cataracte, ta source aux pieds, des pitons verts, finira dans la grande mer, gouffre bleu, nous nous noyâmes, dans les larmes marées, de la lune, Portal, Flame, 2024. Wood, roucou, acrylic paint

59 x 108 5/8 x 2 3/4 inches (150 x 276 x 7 cm.)