The Pavilion of the Republic of Bulgaria at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

The Pavilion of the Republic of Bulgaria – The Federation of Minor Practices is conceived as the site of a hypothetical research laboratory operating within a political imaginary oriented toward care. Projected beyond the present, the pavilion looks back to the early twenty-first century as the moment when the conditions for this future first became visible.

The recent past of this formation is presented through four films created specifically for the occasion:

1. “UWU Channel Radiance” by Gery Georgieva, which mobilizes digital myths and prophecies to challenge regimes of identity, pleasure, and mediated truth.

2. “Spray and Pray” by Veneta Androva, a work that examines the infrastructures of disinformation through the ecology of “mushroom websites” and algorithmic systems.

3. “Geography Is Destiny” by Rayna Teneva is a new film that retraces the entanglement of labor, care, and violence in the Valley of the Roses surrounding the Bulgarian town of Kazanlak, where rose harvesting coexists with arms production.

4. Maria Nalbantova’s ongoing work at the Dragoman Marsh in Bulgaria unfolds as a long-term practice of ecological care, combining artistic research, environmental maintenance, and the recording of local human and non-human narratives.

   
   

Conceived as an interactive, videogame-based environment, The Federation of Minor Practices gathers the signals of the four films and activates them through play as a practice of collective orientation. From the perspective of an imagined future, the Pavilion appears as an early laboratory of experimentation, where shared acts of attention, care, and play began to construct a post-sovereign political imagination.

Curator Martina Yordanova states: “The Pavilion does not propose a future. It supports the conditions through which futures begin to take shape collectively, through attention and care.”

Commissioner Dessislava Dimova, National Gallery, Sofia, maintains that: “The Federation is a bold curatorial project that weaves together the practices of four artists who have never worked together before into a shared narrative. The pavilion marks Bulgaria’s fourth consecutive participation in the Art Biennale in recent years. We are building a strong presence in Venice through projects that testify to the vitality of the Bulgarian art scene and its awareness of our historical responsibility in the present.”

Luci d'artista. CANEMORTO: "The Radiant Van"

On Wednesday, March 11, The Radiant Van, the new Luce d’Artista conceived by the anonymous artist trio CANEMORTO, departed from Turin for a five-day performative journey. The project takes the form of a van transformed into a mobile luminous artwork that, over the coming months, will accompany the artists on their way to Ljubljana.

This marks the beginning of a multi-phase project that includes the production of the artwork, the creation of a short film, an exhibition, events in Venice during the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, participation in a festival in Ljubljana, and finally the return home to Turin, where the work will ultimately find its place in the public space.

The project stems from the curatorial vision of Antonio Grulli, who has been directing Luci d’Artista since its 26th edition, and from his decision to invite CANEMORTO to create a new luminous work.

The project is realized with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, within the framework of the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), aimed at promoting Italian contemporary art internationally.

The new Luce d’Artista will enter the collection of the City of Turin starting from the 29th edition (2026–2027), becoming part of the city’s public heritage, managed by Fondazione Torino Musei since 2022.

The van is not merely a means of transportation, but a true mobile light installation. On board travel the artworks destined for the exhibition The Painting Race at Match Gallery in Ljubljana, while the journey itself activates a narrative in motion.

Traveling alongside CANEMORTO are the director Marco Proserpio, sound technician Matteo Pansana, and photographer Alessandro Trapezio, producing a series of video and photographic recordings that document a physical and symbolic connection between Turin and Ljubljana. The journey thus becomes an integral part of the artwork and will culminate in an unreleased short film and in the photographic material for the exhibition catalogue.

CANEMORTO. Photo Ivan Cazzola

The project is rooted in two archetypes closely linked to Turin: its automotive industrial vocation and its historical connection tomagic and esotericism. CANEMORTO transforms a classic work van into a “magic lantern in motion”: perforated panels, engravings, and an internal lighting system—also powered by solar energy—project a constellation of apotropaic signs into the surrounding space.

The sides of the vehicle are engraved with 18 universal symbols inspired by the tradition of white magic, reinterpreted through the distinctive visual language of the trio. Light filters through the surfaces, turning the vehicle into a mobile talisman, capable of activating an ever-changing relationship with the places it passes through and temporarily inhabits.

Garage BENTIVOGLIO presents Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010 by the artist collective Gelitin

Garage BENTIVOGLIO presents, in the window on Via del Borgo di San Pietro — which each month displays a work from the palace’s private collection — an intervention by the Austrian artist collective Gelitin. The presentation features a work that offers an ironic and irreverent reinterpretation of one of the most celebrated masterpieces in the history of art: the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

Made of plasticine and distinguished by a large protruding nose that disrupts its frontal view, the work invites viewers to shift sideways in order to observe it, transforming the act of looking into a physical gesture.

Gelitin, Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio, ph. Carlo Favero

This proposal looks to the intervention by Lina Bo Bardi in the upper gallery of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Brazilian museum she created together with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi in 1968, still considered one of the most revolutionary exhibition designs in twentieth-century museography. They decided to arrange the works so that they would saturate the space without a predefined hierarchy, allowing visitors to move freely among the large glass panels on which the paintings were suspended, constructing personal paths and unexpected juxtapositions between different periods, schools, and styles.

Freed from a rigid order, the collection thus offered itself to a more direct and intuitive gaze: all the works stood on the same level, having arrived in São Paulo almost simultaneously as a group. The intention was to make everything feel new to the visitor and to suggest that art produced on this side of the ocean might perhaps need to be stripped of its accumulated frameworks and seen with fresh eyes. A fifteenth-century painting could be placed next to a nineteenth-century one; the Italian school could encounter the Flemish tradition; and even masters such as Raphael and Pietro Perugino might appear surprisingly similar.

By mixing artists and styles in a light and almost unconscious manner, within a space open to new relationships and possibilities, the works—freed from a certain academicism—could once again begin to produce meaning.

Gelitin, Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio, ph. Carlo Favero

It is precisely within this freedom of vision that the work of the Austrian artist collective Gelitin takes shape. The large protruding nose that distorts the face of the Mona Lisa compels us to observe it more from the side than from the front, recalling the profile portraits of the Dukes of Urbino immortalized by Piero della Francesca, while the plasticine draws its vivid colours from the paintings of the early Renaissance of the Grand Duchy. What remains distinctly Leonardesque are several essential elements: the faithful adherence to the subject, the dimensions of the work, and above all an almost fetishistic obsession with the original.

As curator Davide Trabucco explains: “A copy of a work must come to terms with the idea we have of it; redrawing it is first and foremost a way of entering into dialogue with the original and reinterpreting its ultimate meanings. Re-making is an interpretative act; formal correspondences go hand in hand with choices that may appear arbitrary or incomplete, yet they prove to be the only way to transform those ancient signs into modern ones.”