Then do they not look at the camels – how they are created?
And at the sky – how it is raised?
And at the mountains – how they are erected?
And at the earth – how it is spread out?
Quran, Surat Al-Ghashiyah , verses 17 to 20
Abdelkader Damani is an Algerian-French curator, philosopher and art historian whose work explores the relationships between art, territories and the communities that inhabit them. His research questions how museums might become places where different histories, geographies and ways of knowing can coexist.
Trained in architecture in Oran, and in art history and philosophy in Lyon, he draws on Arab, African and European intellectual traditions, including Islamic thought. His work approaches the South as a condition of thought and action rather than a geographical designation.
Over nearly thirty years, he has developed this approach through institutional leadership and curatorial practice. He directed VEDUTA at the Lyon Biennale, served as General Director of FRAC Centre-Val de Loire, founded the Orléans Architecture Biennial, was co-curator of Dak’Art and Artistic Director of the inaugural Rabat Biennial, and advised Saudi Arabia’s Museums Commission.
As Artistic Director of AEON Collective, he extended his research into the relationships between art, nature and the living world, developing projects such as Tales From Earth in Venice in 2025. Currently Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, he contributes to the development of its inaugural collection displays, exhibitions, research and publications, pursuing a question that has accompanied his work across institutions: how can a museum belong to the world beyond the place in which it stands?
About
The Earth as the only museum
Climate change reveals the fragility of the world, so we dream of a future world safe to protect us from the risks that threaten us. We even fantasize about leaving the earth to inhabit other planets. But we have only the earth as our dwelling, and we have inhabited it for millennia without damaging it. We must therefore make the effort to remember the times when we lived in the company of animals, close to plants, close to the oceans. The heat, the cold, the wind, the rain were our allies.
In today's age, to say "I dream, therefore I am" seems to be freedom-constraining. We live in a world of permanent illusion, one that is dominated by screens. G.A.F.A. seems to have replaced the God whose death was once announced in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The new deities create a conformist copy of the world, a facsimile of ourselves and the constructed world we inhabit. Reality is reproduced endlessly in the flow of communications and social networks and may no longer be necessary.
Being aware of this illusion forces us to find other life strategies, a new way of countering facial recognition, geolocation and all the other modes of tracking that haunt us. Are we still able to escape what is predictable? Are there still strangers to meet? And what if, as Luciano Canfora suggests, "Reality itself, the visible one, is a deforming copy of the real world, the world of ideas"? How then can we find our way back to the real world of ideas?
This is what exhibitions and museums must take care of. Even if an exhibition is never completed. In fact, making an exhibition is the realization of an unfinished.
The art exhibition is an artisanal affair that proceeds from the pre- and the post- and a chain of risk-taking, especially in the case of a Biennale. Prepare, review again, make and undo, arrange and deconstruct... convince artists, reassure them, love them, and remain faithful to them. And to choose them to remember them. Choosing artists is a matter of remembrance.
Exhibiting works is the act of unfolding a fold, untying a knot to create new ones. Redrawing the territory for an idea or inventing a territory for an idea that does not have one: the holy grail of curatorial activity.
Reading the Qur'an occurs to us to conclude that we are obliged to look at the world, to meditate on it at every moment. And make it the one and only museum.
The whole world as a single museum. It is this quest that drives the paths that I have been travelling, often despite myself, for decades. Because what is a museum if not a floating territory above ground. A place to get out of the illusion of the constructed world and meet the world of ideas. But that hope ended up becoming a new illusion. By enclosing the works too much within four walls, and by assigning them to respect boundaries, we have made our museums reproduce our Colonial Thoughts.
It is strange, for example, to see the prohibition made on a work of ancient Egypt to leave its world to go and meet an Italian painting. And to see the solitude of the works, said to be of a primitive art, experience the sadness of exile and the insult of the exotic. Instead of being a place of freedom, the museum teaches respect for borders and the sacredness of origins. Far be it from me to deny inheritance, let alone the right to ontological identity. But it is reckless not to extend our identity to what surrounds us: the sky, the trees, the rain, the animals... and then the Other.
Could we, one day, think of the museum as the continuity of the world as it is? Will the museum ever be sensitive to the screams of the Earth and its inhabitants?
I don't have an answer to give, but I know that we will have to start by spending time looking at the stars, another time to fight with the Palestinians, and yet another to rescue the drowned in the Mediterranean... and so on. Until the day when museums let in the wind and the stranger.