From left to right: Rayna Teneva, Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Martina Yordanova and Maria Nalbantova © Maximilian Pramatarov How do we imagine a different political future from within the fractured conditions of the present? The Bulgarian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale takes this as its central proposition. Conceived as a fictional research laboratory positioned slightly ahead of the present, The Federation of Minor Practices looks back at our contemporary moment as the condition from which an alternative political imagination might still emerge.
Four films by Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva collectively chart the pressures and fractures of that moment. Androva's Spray and Pray exposes the ecosystem of mushroom websites through which disinformation circulates as a political and economic infrastructure. Teneva's Geography Is Destiny returns to her hometown of Kazanlak, where rose harvesting and arms production coexist in the same valley, revealing how labour, militarisation, and inequality have shaped everyday life across generations. Nalbantova's Swamp Song turns to the Dragoman Marsh, an ecosystem at the EU border marked by drainage, migration, and wildfires, where human, ecological, and political histories layer over one another. Georgieva's UWU Channel Radiance: Sybil's Noon Shower of Stones constructs an altar-like multi-screen environment in which the artist becomes a contemporary newscaster delivering cryptic prophecies drawn from self-help forums, folkloric narratives, and algorithmic logic.
From these films, the pavilion builds its speculative proposition. KAZANA, an interactive video game developed with a VR lab, draws directly on all four works, placing visitors inside a process of decision-making that continuously reshapes the pavilion throughout its six-month run. Through choices and shared acts of attention, care, and play, visitors are invited to collectively imagine an alternative political future and a different way of living together. Curator Martina Yordanova assembled an entirely women-led team across every role, making the pavilion's internal structure an extension of its political imagination.
We spoke with Yordanova about the decision to route a deeply political project through speculation, the four films and what they collectively chart about the contemporary moment, the making and logic of KAZANA, the deliberate choice to assemble an entirely women-led team, and what it means to present a project about post-sovereign political imagination at the most contested edition of the Biennale in recent memory.
Jelena Martinović: The pavilion takes a speculative rather than a direct approach, looking back at the present from an imagined future. What made you choose speculation as the entry point for this project?
Martina Yordanova: Speculation became important for the project because it allowed us to step outside the immediacy of the present and look at our current moment from a certain distance. We are living through overlapping political, ecological, and technological crises that often feel impossible to fully process while being inside them. By imagining a future perspective looking back at the early 21st century, the pavilion creates a space where the present can be examined almost like a historical condition or a social symptom.
What interested us was not creating a utopian vision of the future, but using speculation as a tool for reflection. Imagination becomes a way of questioning what kinds of realities we are already producing today and what alternative futures might still be possible. In that sense, the speculative framework was less about escaping reality and more about finding another language through which to confront it.
Jelena Martinović: What brought you to these four artists specifically, and what was the thinking behind assembling an all-women team?
Martina Yordanova: What brought me to Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva was a shared sensibility within their practices, despite the fact that they work in very different ways. All four are deeply attentive to the social, political, ecological, and emotional conditions of contemporary life, but they approach these questions with nuance, vulnerability, and complexity rather than certainty or direct confrontation. Their works leave space for ambiguity and reflection, which became very important for the pavilion.
At the same time, the decision to assemble an entirely women-led team was absolutely intentional. This extended beyond the artists themselves to include the exhibition designer, video game designer, graphic designer, communication team, and production coordinators. In a way, the pavilion itself became a speculative experiment. What happens when an entire structure is imagined, produced, and sustained exclusively through female perspectives and forms of collaboration? It was never about reproducing traditional ideas of power, but rather about testing different modes of working together, decision-making, care, and collective responsibility.
This also connects to the idea of the pavilion as a research laboratory. The project is not only presenting speculation conceptually, but also embodying it through its own internal structure and processes. It is practicing it.
Jelena Martinović: The pavilion is envisioned as a fictional lab operating within an experiment in a post-sovereign, care-oriented political form. What is the Federation of Minor Practices proposing politically?
Martina Yordanova: Politically, The Federation of Minor Practices is less interested in proposing a fixed ideology or a clearly defined program, and more interested in practicing alternative ways of being together. The pavilion approaches politics not only through discourse or representation, but through forms of relation, collaboration, attentiveness, and collective participation.
What became important for us was the idea that small gestures, minor actions, and fragile forms of coexistence can also carry political potential. Instead of imagining power through dominance or control, the project asks whether other structures might emerge through care, negotiation, vulnerability, and mutual dependency. In that sense, the “post-sovereign” aspect of the pavilion is connected to moving away from rigid hierarchies and singular authority toward more fluid and collective forms of exchange.
At the same time, the pavilion does not present these ideas as solutions or utopias. It functions more as an experiment, a temporary environment where different possibilities of social organization, responsibility, and coexistence can be tested, experienced, and reflected upon collectively.
Jelena Martinović: Each of the four films addresses a different aspect of our contemporary moment. What do they chart, individually and collectively, and how does that become the ground from which the pavilion's speculative proposition grows?
Martina Yordanova: Individually, the four films trace different symptoms and conditions of contemporary life, ranging from ecological fragility and technological mediation to systems of labor, power, memory, and collective anxiety. Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva each approach these questions through very distinct visual and narrative languages, but all of the works remain deeply attentive to the emotional and political atmosphere of the present moment.
What connects them is that none of the films attempt to offer definitive conclusions or direct judgments. Instead, they observe, reveal, and sometimes quietly speculate on the structures shaping everyday reality. Together, they form a kind of collective map of contemporary conditions, almost like fragments of evidence gathered inside the fictional research laboratory of the pavilion.
This becomes the ground from which the speculative dimension of the project grows. The future imagined by the pavilion does not emerge from fantasy detached from reality, but from a close reading of the present itself. The films function almost like signals or traces through which possible futures can already be sensed, questioned, or reimagined.
Jelena Martinović: The game KAZANA is a collaborative work, developed with a VR lab, and none of the artists had prior experience in game-making. How did that process unfold?
Martina Yordanova: KAZANA developed through a genuinely collective process together with Zlatka Uzunova and the VR lab she leads, in close collaboration with Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, Rayna Teneva, and myself as curator navigating the overall process. None of the artists had previous experience in game-making, which made the entire development feel experimental from the very beginning.
Each artist contributed at different stages of the game’s creation, helping shape the visual environment, the logic of interaction, and the ethical and emotional questions visitors encounter while playing. The game invites participants to make decisions, respond to situations, and navigate shifting conditions that continuously affect the state of the pavilion itself.
In many ways, the process of creating KAZANA mirrored the conceptual structure of the pavilion. It became another form of the speculative research laboratory, where collaboration itself functioned as an experiment. We never fully knew where the process would lead or how the different elements would eventually come together. That openness and unpredictability remain embedded within the game today. The pavilion constantly changes through the decisions of its visitors, meaning that its state is never fixed, but continuously reshaped through collective participation.
Jelena Martinović: The game uses fragments from the four films to invite visitors into a collective imagination of an alternative political future. How does it work?
Martina Yordanova: KAZANA incorporates fragments and ideas from all four films, sometimes very directly and sometimes in much more abstract ways. Many of the questions within the game emerge from the themes the films explore, while in some cases actual questions or statements from the films reappear inside the gameplay itself. For visitors who have already experienced the films, the game creates an additional layer of connection and reflection. At the same time, KAZANA also functions as an autonomous artwork that can be experienced independently.
What becomes important is that the game transforms the visitor from a passive observer into an active participant. Players are constantly invited to make decisions, respond to situations, and navigate ethical or emotional choices. Through these actions, they activate different indexes embedded within the game, including care, power, fear, truth, and transformation. These indexes continuously shift according to the collective decisions of all visitors, meaning that the state of the pavilion is never fixed, but constantly evolving.
At certain moments, the game reveals how these collective tendencies are changing, showing, for example, whether participants are moving more toward care, fear, or transformation. Toward the end of the journey, each player arrives at a world shaped through their own decisions and is then asked whether they would choose to remain there. In this sense, the game becomes both personal and collective at once. It reflects the idea that every action leaves a trace, that societies are shaped through accumulated choices, and that imagining a future also means taking responsibility for the world one creates.
Jelena Martinović: Collectivity, uncertainty, and play are central to how the pavilion works. How do these conditions reshape political imagination?
Martina Yordanova: Collectivity, uncertainty, and play became important because they allow political imagination to move away from fixed ideologies, rigid structures, and predetermined outcomes. Instead of presenting a single vision of the future, the pavilion creates a space where futures are negotiated collectively, through participation, interaction, and continuous transformation.
Uncertainty is essential here because we are already living in unstable conditions politically, ecologically, and socially. Rather than trying to eliminate that instability, the pavilion works with it. The speculative and playful structure allows visitors to experiment, make choices, fail, rethink, and imagine alternatives without the pressure of arriving at one final answer.
At the same time, play opens a different kind of political engagement. It activates people emotionally and physically, not only intellectually. Through participation, visitors become aware that their actions affect others and contribute to a larger collective condition. In that sense, the pavilion proposes political imagination not as a theory, but as something practiced together in real time.
Jelena Martinović: This is arguably the most politically charged edition of the Biennale in recent memory, marked by protests and institutional rupture, reflecting a broader global moment of profound instability. What does it mean to present a project about post-sovereign political imagination here and now?
Martina Yordanova: Presenting a project about post-sovereign political imagination within the current context of La Biennale di Venezia inevitably gives the pavilion an additional layer of urgency. We are witnessing a moment of profound instability globally, where political systems, institutions, and dominant narratives increasingly appear fragile, exhausted, or unable to respond to the realities unfolding around us. In that sense, the pavilion does not try to offer solutions, but rather creates a space for reflecting on what kinds of social and political imaginaries might still be possible beyond these conditions.
What feels important right now is the attempt to shift attention away from centralized forms of power and toward smaller, more fragile, but also more collective forms of coexistence. The idea of the “post-sovereign” here is not about the disappearance of politics, but about rethinking how responsibility, care, participation, and interdependence could function differently.
At the same time, the pavilion remains very aware of its own contradictions. To speak about alternative political forms within a major international institution like the Biennale also means acknowledging the tensions and limitations of that context itself. But perhaps this is precisely where speculative projects can become productive, by opening temporary spaces where other ways of imagining and practicing together can still emerge, even within unstable or contradictory structures.
