Mangrove Museum: Decay, Relation, and Archipelagic Heritage

Abstract

This presentation unfolds from the notion of the Mangrove Museum (Museu-Mangue), a conceptual and curatorial framework developed in dialogue with Sylvie Glissant during the preparation of the exhibition A Terra, o Fogo, a Água e os Ventos – Por um Museu da Errância com Édouard Glissant (The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds – For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2025). Emerging from the broader Archipelagic Museum project, this research translates Glissant’s poetics of Relation, opacity, and errantry into museological and digital practices. It proposes that museums, rather than repositories of fixed meaning, can act as living mangroves: porous, unstable, and generative ecosystems that thrive in conditions of decay.

For Glissant, the mangrove is both metaphor and method: a space of entanglement where roots intertwine without hierarchy, where sedimentation and decomposition coexist. It embodies the relational ontology of the Tout-Monde, in which identity arises through contact rather than origin. The Mangrove Museum transposes this vision into heritage practice, conceiving decay not as a failure to preserve but as a critical and creative force that reshapes how we understand value, memory, and care. Decay, here, becomes a language of Relation, where the museum’s stability gives way to transformation, and where archives and technologies are approached as living matter. This concept is articulated through curatorial and digital infrastructures developed in Brazil – most notably the Afro-Digital Museums Network (Museus Afrodigitais) and the Acervo da Laje Digital. Both initiatives reconfigure the museum as a distributed ecosystem of custodianship, grounded in the communities from which collections originate. The Afro-Digital Museums, created in collaboration with the Federal University of Bahia, restitute dispersed Afro-Brazilian collections through open digital interfaces that enable visual and metadata-based search. Their architecture embodies a form of digital decay: a fragmentation of centralized authority that redistributes curatorial agency and allows for multiplicity, contradiction, and reactivation. The Acervo da Laje Digital, a community-based collection from Salvador’s Subúrbio Ferroviário, extends this logic. Through the digitization of domestic archives – photographs, sculptures, and oral histories – it creates a shared digital mangrove, where materials circulate as living sediments, constantly re-captioned and transformed by collective memory.

In this sense, the Mangrove Museum engages decay as both material and epistemological condition. It acknowledges the vulnerabilities of digital preservation (obsolescence, data loss, algorithmic opacity) as forms of productive instability that mirror the ecological processes of the mangrove itself. By embracing these frictions, the museum becomes a site of archipelagic heritage: a network of partial, relational, and coexisting worlds, open to unforeseen futures. Ultimately, the Mangrove Museum proposes that to care through decay is to practice a decolonial ethics of relation—one that nurtures what is decomposing, listens to what is opaque, and recognizes decay as a form of resistance against totalizing preservation. Through Glissant’s lens, decay ceases to be the opposite of heritage; it becomes its condition of possibility.