At Spiaggia Libera and PUNTA Gallery in Varna, Odyssea: Le sel de la terre gathers six artists around the symbols of sea and salt — a Bulgarian-French collaboration that unfolds beyond linear history, into a narrative of transformation, ecological entanglement, and anticipation.
Curated by Boyana Dzhikova, Camille Velluet, and Sacha Guedj Cohen, the exhibition brings together Elvire Menetrier, Marilou Poncin, Nina Boughanim, Petja Ivanova, Todor Rabadzhiyski, and Valentin Vert. The title draws on salt's dual nature — corrosive and purifying, preserving and dissolving — and materialises this tension through piles of charred debris around which the artists' works unfold. Following an earlier presentation at the BUNA Festival in Varna, this iteration proposes a different temporality: one that moves beyond the sequential, toward the anticipatory.
The materials chosen across the six practices are as precise as they are strange. Latex bas-reliefs. Oil painting with pigment mixed with blood. Lead-based silver white pigment. Amphorae and storage containers. Chitin-based fabrics woven from insect waste. Artificial nails. An oil lamp driven by an industrial mechanism. Each medium arrives carrying its own chemical history — the logic of preservation and decay, of the body metabolised into artifact.
The exhibition examines humanity's connection to organic matter and ecological systems through practices that do not illustrate this connection but enact it. Works explore biomatter transformation, the innovative use of materials derived from living organisms, female empowerment amid societal tensions, introspection, and the relationship between technological progress and natural cycles. The sea and the salt interweave past, present, and future through a shared Mediterranean and European context that is simultaneously specific and wide open.
Odyssea runs through May 9, 2026. It proposes no resolution, only the ongoing encounter with the systems that outlast us — the ocean that predates us, the salt that survives us, the chitin and the blood and the carbonised matter that will remain when the exhibition closes and the walls go bare again.
