Nataša Petrešin: Listening to Forgotten Histories

Nataša Petrešin – My curatorial journey is deeply intertwined with my personal life’s paths and convictions. Originating from former Yugoslavia, I have grown to believe in the socialist and feminist values, which unfortunately have been misused and led to a bloody civil war, of which a part of my family suffered from. Through this transformative time, I became early on vividly interested in those beautiful moments when art, arts and culture have led to actual historical resistance and contributed to gather communities around the issues that would profoundly improve certain discursive or actual aspects in a given space and time. Much later on and after many experiences across various geographies within Europe but also Lebanon, China and now United Arab Emirates, I remain deeply interested in the intersections between art, ecosocial issues, politics and feminism, where I have always asked myself how to do something, not only what to convey or reveal through any project. Furhtermore, there is the question of friendship that I explore throughout every project that I do, its politics and life-affirming care-oriented relation that it brings forth.

In that way, my relationship with the Nonument Group is much older than this year’s project for the Slovenian Pavilion. Our paths have crossed over decades, personally and professionally, and I have had the pleasure to collaborate with some of the members individually, and then when they formed the Nonument Group, to admire the strength of their research, the way they work collectively, across artistic, architectural and historical disciplines, listening deeply to the sites of trouble and of forgotten stories. Their practice also considers what we choose to remember, and what becomes invisible through political and social processes, which has always driven me in my curatorial research.

NP – The project for the Slovenian Pavilion was never going to be a representation based on an easily recognisable national image, but a project that could open a more complicated space of reflection around Slovenia, Europe and the histories that continue to shape us. Today physically absent mosque, except for its foundation buried in the grass field, played a pivotal role in this process and, as any absence, required a different kind of attention. From beginning, following their usual research practice, together with the Nonument Group we invited Anja Zalta, Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Ljubljana and a long-term friend of mine, to join us in diving into this historic, religious as well as contemporary political exploration. Through interviews with local community, researchers and members of the Islamic community of Slovenia, we encountered traces, fragments, voices, documents, memories of the physical remains beneath the ground that compose the project Soundtrack for an Invisible House.

Rather than reconstructing the mosque’s remains, we wanted to create the conditions in which its absence could be felt and considered. When dealing with a place that has been erased from collective memory, reconstruction can very easily become another form of appropriation. Here, the invisible house becomes an invitation to listen, since one of the main components of the project is an actual sound poem and vocal composition, rather than an object to consume. There is speech, but also silence, breath, landscape and something less easily identifiable. In that sense, the soundtrack does not simply narrate the mosque; it evokes the conditions of remembering and forgetting.

NP – It was essential not to force these narratives into a single explanatory framework. The story of the mosque itself from its inception until today resists that. The mosque was connected to the movement of soldiers, prisoners of war, Islamic communities and imperial structures during the First World War, but its subsequent disappearance also tells us something about how histories are selected, suppressed or transformed. We therefore tried to work through juxtaposition and resonance rather than through an accumulation of information. Historical research, archaeological evidence, voices, sound and artistic interpretation coexist without one becoming the definitive key to all the others.

I wouldn’t say that the installation works on ambiguity. It is rather, and literally, an open field of material that resembles rubble or ruins that we sourced from the material used for the previous Venice Biennale of Architecture, envelopped in the poetical narration of the sound composition that leads the public through the meanders of the mosque’s history until today. We hoped the installation would change the pace of the visitor. Venice Biennale audiences are often moving rapidly from one pavilion to another. Here, one has to listen. The installation asks for a certain attentiveness and perhaps also for a moment of suspension.

NP – This kind of question has been central in our conversations with Anja Zalta during the research phase of the project. As a difference to sociology or history, artistic research enables neglected stories to be translated into visual language that remain alive as fields of negotiation. Particularly the story of the Log pod Mangartom mosque has been carried by people who refused to let its memory disappear, and this project is also paying respect to them. The project makes visible questions that are still with us: how societies remember religious and cultural differences, how war produces encounters as well as destruction, and how certain forms of belonging become recognised while others remain marginal.

There is important space enabled for the public to experience the story through the lens of the contemporary moment that is one where wars and genocides are raging ever again. The fact that the site of the Slovenian Pavilion lies across the Lebanese Pavilion in Arsenale, further deepened the possibility to read it through the contemporary moment. Another important parallel was also drawn when our Pavilion joined a 24-hour strike and mass protest took place at the Venice Biennale on May 8, 2026, organized by the Art not Genocide Alliance to protest Israel's military actions in Gaza.

NP – With a collective such as Nonument Group, the curator becomes an integral part of the research, an interested member of the temporary research community, as it leads to continually changing questions and answers. My role was therefore partly to listen, to recognise where the material is leading, and to help create the conditions in which the different strands can become a sound and visual composition, an experience.

Alongside mine, each one’s voice entered through the questions we posed ourselves or to the people whom we interviewed, the relationships we established with them, but also with those who are no longer there, the decisions about context and the ways in which we translated the material to the public who would encounter the story for the very first time.

I only hope that my ongoing curatorial work with the elements and processes of the archival research, situated knowledge and practices of care helped the final form in which you encounter it in Arsenale to arise.

NP – Perhaps a national pavilion can become less about presenting a stable image of a nation and more about questioning how that image has been constructed. A country is also made of its silences, contradictions, forgotten places and histories that do not fit comfortably into a national narrative. In that sense, Soundtrack for an Invisible House also continues the questioning of the Biennale's model of national representation.

The absence at the centre of the project is therefore not only the absence of a building. It can also be understood as an invitation to imagine other forms of representation: less monumental, less definitive and more attentive to the seeming margins of the land or of the events. At a moment when national identities are again being asserted with great force, perhaps the pavilion can remind us that what we call a nation is always composed of many voices, movements, encounters and histories—some made visible, while others made almost impossible to hear.

Credits:
1. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, portrait. Photo: Maurine Tric.
2. Nonument Group, portrait. Photo: Peter Giordani.
3. Superposition of an archival photograph documenting the construction of a mosque in Log pod Mangartom (1917) and a digital terrain model derived from airborne LiDAR (ALS) data. Archival photograph courtesy of Uroš Košir.
4. Slovenia Pavilion. Photo: Asiana Jurca Avci. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.
5. Slovenia Pavilion. Photo: Asiana Jurca Avci. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.
6. Recording Silence. Photo: Neja Tomšič.
7. Field Marking the Mosque in Log pod Mangartom. Photo: Neja Tomšič.