Two national pavilions of Eastern Europe countries use similar, theatrical approaches to exploring their political pasts. Both Serbia and Bulgaria have created immersive, world-building installations that take the visitor through an uncanny experience, though with different dramaturgy and modes of contemplating memory and history.

Serbia’s presentation, Exposition Coloniale from artist Aleksander Denić and curator Ksenija Samardžija, is a playful, theme park-like collection of commercial architectures, shops, and between places that act as a de ja vu of what may have been present before the creation of modern-day Serbia. Bulgaria’s national offering is located away from the two main Biennale sites at the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli, edging onto the The Canale della Giudecca, also creates an immersive, all-encompassing space to reflect upon the nation’s past. Here, however, the re-enactment is not based upon irony and pop-playfulness, but on dark, deep, poetic aural and object histories of persecution within forced labour camps and prisons between 1945 and 1989.




Curated by Vasil Vladimirov and featuring artists Krasimira Butseva, Lilia Topouzova, and Julian Chehirian, Bulgaria’s offering, The Neighbours, invites you to sit down and dwell with the testimonies and gravitas presented. Laid out with period furniture, cabinetry, and technology, visitors are invited to sit on the sofas and engage with histories presented through audio, projection, and the selection of books, objects, and works scatted across the scene. Designed as a line of inquiry and archive as much as creative display of Bulgaria’s past, visitors are unable to simply look at the art as is possible in some national pavilions. Here, visitors are invited to become witnesses more then viewers, and to spend time with the project, listen to the stories, and consider the arrangements of the space, requiring an amount of emotional labour.

Over the socialist era, hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians were sent to camps without trial. The breadth of individuals sent away included political dissidents, artists, peasants who refused to give their land to the state, gay people, Muslim minorities, and others who opposed the ideology. Once the regime collapsed, the archive of the secret police was slowly, systematically destroyed, though survivors and came forward to speak of their experiences.




A ten-year trial against perpetrators collapsed in 2002 due to the statute of limitations, but a year later the team behind this Venice presentation began research into memories of the camps. Central are forty interviews, some of which are used in the exhibition which is designed to recreate fragments of survivors’ homes within which the interviews were conducted.

The objects around the room – wine, cigarettes, nicknacks, photographs, books, etc – are intermingled with items from the camps: a police file, a smuggled letter. There are items of nature throughout, including stones and water, recovered by the artists from the landscapes that were once the camps. Across it all, lighting and projections work with the audio recordings to set a sombre, reflective mood, but one about recognition and regrowth, awareness and acknowledgement.




Aleksandar Denić’s Exposition Coloniale also recreates a conflicted, confused past with gaps in cultural memory. Conceived as an exploratory landscape of social memorabilia, it is rooted in Michel Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, a world within a world designed to both mimic and unsettle, invite recollection but keep an idea of the past in its place.

Outside the entrance to the Serbia pavilion, built in the 1930s when the Giardini expanded, has the word JUGOSLAVIA monumentally formed into its façade. Inside, the creative team have created a series of small buildings and pavilions, all able to be entered and explored, as architectural situations  that speak to a conflation of physical and emotional memories the country’s past.



The memories are unreliable, and in places deliberately played by the artist. The construct speaks to the official national history, cultural and social recollections, myth and imagination, and romantic ideals of what once was, or even a past future hope. This is a version of Serbia, but it could be anywhere, speaking to levers of capitalism and the European project as much as socialism or ideologies of the postwar period. At once, it is humorous but with a discomfort, injecting the ideas and architectures with a sense of nervousness not only for Serbian nationals but for all passing-through international visitors – this nonplace speaks to all places.

Denić is not only a visual artist, but also a stage and film production designer for projects from period dramas about Rasputin, horror films, and opera. Here, his scenography combines elements of all these and while does not contain one single narrative as a drama project may, it invites countless unravellings and lines of inquiry. This border-town like collection of spaces creates open-stories about the other, the places and ideas just the other side of the border – whether that’s geographic, political, chronological, or architectural.




Both Serbia’s and Bulgaria’s Venice Biennale pavilions use strategies of architectural worldbuilding to create immersive, uncanny spaces. The Neighbours presents a place between memory and physicality as a genuine, habitable, and domestic environment overlaid with palimpsests of traumatic memory, evidence, and visual record. It speaks to how such cultural and personal memories do not only penetrate a people and their story, but the soil and nature of a place. Exposition Coloniale may read as an altogether more punchy and witty reconstruction from memories and imaginaries, but within it there is also a present a darkness and loss of hope. Both projects carry a sense of searching through the rubble of memory and place to find a sense of past truth and what was lost.