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.”