ANCA BENERA & ARNOLD ESTEFAN BLACK SEAS: ROMANIA AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
The project representing Romania at the 2026 La Biennale di Venezia unfolds across two venues. The Pavilion in the Giardini presents a polyphonic installation of sound, moving image, and sculptural instruments, approaching the Black Sea as a site of acoustic memory, ecological transformation, and geopolitical tension. In the Palazzo Correr, the project extends beyond the Black Sea, tracing its connections to wider planetary systems of extraction, circulation, and interdependence.
Romanian Pavilion - Giardini della Biennale & Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research, Venice
All elements in this installation operate as part of a larger whole. Nothing stands alone. Each component resonates with the others, forming an interdependent system in which image, sound, and matter interact. What unfolds is not a single narrative, but a confluence. A field of relations. A sea that is always more than one.
Rivers of Residue
A sea is never only water. It emerges through the rivers it gathers, the currents it sets in motion, and the forces (material, historical, and political) that pass through it. In the Black Sea, this condition is sedimented with conflict, extraction, and ongoing geopolitical tensions that persist beneath the surface. A series of prints presents acoustic (sonar) images of the seabed that carry the traces of past conflicts. Embroidered across them are the paths of major rivers—the Danube, Don, and Dnieper—tracing the flows that feed into the Black Sea. These rivers carry ecological distress and layered histories that combine with the other hidden dynamics shaping the sea, merging with salt water.
Floating Sensors
At sea, some buoys function as techno-scientific devices that read waves. They measure the movement of the sea with sensors and send the data to satellites. As “other-than-human sensing organs” (Stefan Helmreich, 2023), they extend how we sense the sea while pointing to processes beyond what oceanography can fully capture. Other types of buoys mark navigable routes and shallow waters. For this work, buoys from the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Baltic, and Adriatic (waters connected by shared conditions) are brought together and transformed into sound-producing sculptural instruments. Altered by wave collisions and prolonged exposure, they carry the marks of turbulence, with storms and biological and chemical traces inscribed into their surfaces. They carry accumulated energy from waves and storms, released here as sound.
Reading Waves as Notation
The sound composition is centred around wave behaviour as its primary structural model. Sound operates as a system of interacting waves—propagating, interfering, reflecting, and dissipating through space. Composed by Simina Oprescu, the soundscape is developed in direct response to the pavilion’s architectural and acoustic conditions. In dialogue with the works of Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, the piece adopts the sea as its compositional grammar: history as stratification, ecology as latency, geopolitics as pressure. The pavilion is treated as an acoustic body whose geometry, surfaces, and reverberant behavior actively shape the work.
How to mend a broken sea?
A performer (Diana Miron) engages the sea through attentive listening, translating its oscillations into sound as if following a score. Inspired by Romanian spectral music and ecofeminist thought, the voice does not impose melody but follows the presence of the waves. A floating buoy, carried by shifting rhythms, becomes an instrument. The sea’s turbulence not only inspires the performance but actively shapes it, with the sea itself acting as composer.
Underwater imagery reveals traces of past conflicts unfolding beneath the visible surface. It moves from large-scale formations to microscopic life, where algae and cyanobacteria interact. Together, these processes point to a transitional, latent state, presenting the sea as a layered system in constant transformation.
The Black Sea
A gravity core from the anoxic depths (2,123 m) of the Black Sea is a silent archive — a record authored by the sea. Layer by layer, it preserves thousands of years, from the sea’s formation to its present imbalances. It records climatic shifts, human interventions, and ecological changes.
*borrowed from The National Research-Development Institute for Marine Geology and Geoecology (GeoEcoMar) as a result of H2020 DOORS (Developing Optimal and Open Research Support in the Black Sea) project. photo © Adrian Teacă
Other Seas
The 3-channel video installation Blue Ground (2021–2022) traces a dispersed geography linking the Atlantic Ocean, the Namib Desert, and a Black Sea shipyard where the diamond-mining vessel Benguela Gem was built. Through this trajectory, oceans and deserts emerge as interconnected sites, shaped by the movement of resources, technologies, and labour.
In The Delusion of the Commons (2021–2026), a sculptural form brings together the deep-sea hydrothermal vent and the mythical Tower of Babel. The work reflects on the sea as a contested commons—shared yet divided, governed yet unstable—while surrounding drawings speculate on submerged futures influenced by microbial life, mineral extraction, and planetary governance.
...