the transnational air pavilion
Bulle Cybernetiqué. Vaporizing Submarine Cyber Threats

At the 61st Venice Art Biennale, the Nauru National Pavilion will be permeated by the Transnational Air Pavilion.

As the climate crisis unfolds in its gaseous dimension — through pollutants as well as nuclear and chemical threats — the project investigates air as a medium and narrative of economic, digital, environmental and chemical-bacteriological conflicts.

At a time when the physical borders of nation-states are surpassed by the political territory of the air, the Transnational Air Pavilion moves beyond the logic of national pavilions to explore one of the most expansive territories on the planet, defined by the transnational condition of the atmosphere and its permeability across living organisms.

The main sense used for the Transnational Air Pavilion will be the olfaction, which is the most primary and at the same time the most future-oriented, the one that will guide towards a common idea of planet and coexistence.

The direction of the investigation is conceived by Elena Giulia Abbiatici, art historian, researcher and art curator with a focus in multimedia and olfactive art practices, and Anna Barbara, architect and expert in Olfactive Design, and President of POLI.design.

The research aims to explore the role that olfaction may assume with the advent of the Internet of Senses and the potential challenges it may face within an increasingly chemically polluted atmosphere and a techno-centralized systemic environment.

The project focuses on the conception and critical design of an innovative olfactive culture at the intersection of creative, scientific, and technological fields. Its goal is to foster reflection and contribute to new ways of cohabiting with the spaces we breathe and inhabit.

Today, the invisible circulates through communication networks, memory databases, and intelligent machines. Its presence becomes particularly evident within the atmosphere itself, where technological infrastructures, ecological crisis and geopolitical tensions converge.

Through a mysterious and seductive fragrance—volatile and ephemeral—the Transnational Air Pavilion embodies the uncanny dimension of contemporary technologies and reveals the hidden dynamics of cyber and economic conflicts through airborne odorant molecules, and invites visitors to sense the atmosphere as both archive and political territory.

Bulle Cybernetiqué, conceived by Elena Giulia Abbiatici and developed in collaboration with the nose and olfaction sociologist Diletta Tonatto, proposes a series of aesthetic short circuits that explores the political potential embedded in the metabolism of air.

Through a contemporary artistic approach, encrypted digital information is translated into a volatile essence, conceived as a coded enigma where data becomes olfactory notes, opening a participatory olfactory decoding experience. The olfactory code in this way becomes a form of secret communication in hypothetical periods of global censorship.

This olfactive intervention acts as an inaugural gesture for the Pavilion’s opening in May 2026, gradually permeating the Nauru Pavilion and activating the space through an invisible yet pervasive medium.