The Archipelago, Not the Continent

The art world dreams itself as continent — unified, mappable, continuous. A territory to be conquered, defended, expanded. The primary galleries, the major biennials, the auction houses: these are the metropoles from which culture radiates outward to the peripheries.

The logic is arrowlike from center to margin, from West to elsewhere, from established to emerging. Even the language of "emerging" betrays the assumption — as if São Paulo and Lagos and Manila were volcanic islands gradually rising from the sea toward the sunlit surface where New York already floats.

Nonterritorial proposes the archipelago. Not a unified territory but a scattered chain—islands in relation, each with its own ecology, none reducible to any other, unity submarine and invisible but real. The network does not radiate from a center.

It has no center. It is all islands: the Tokyo screening and the bar in Vilnius and the Berlin living room and the university lobby in Nairobi, each a discrete point of emergence, each generating its own atmospheric weather, none more central than any other.

This is what Glissant called Relation identity: not rooted in territory, not projected onto other territories, but arising in the chaotic network of contacts between cultures. The archipelago gives-on-and-with rather than grasps. It does not think of its place as somewhere from which to expand, but as somewhere that exists in relation — changed by its confluences, changing what it touches, never finished, never the same.

The continental model requires conquest. The archipelago requires wandering that does not seek to own what it encounters but to relate to it, be altered by it, carry something of it elsewhere.

Our exhibitions are errant in exactly this sense. They do not arrive to colonize the spaces they enter. They arrive to relate, to create atmosphere, to leave something changed without extracting anything.

Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.