Since 2012, the Romanian artist duo Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, who have been working together, have been showcasing their artwork at the Venice Biennale. Their work is discussed in terms of its political and social bearing, as well as its representation of contemporary life experiences of the Romanian people on a global stage.
The interconnections among history, the environment, and resource politics are explored in their multimedia, multi-layered artwork, which includes installations, sculpture, and drawing. Recent research examines how military imaginaries impact communities, geographies, and climates, and how previous conflicts continue to shape our current surroundings and imagined futures.
Their work has been exhibited internationally at museums and biennials, including Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); Kyiv Biennial (2015, 2023, 2025); Kunsthalle Mainz (2025); Creative Time Summit, New York (2024); Klima Biennale Wien (2024); Art Encounters Biennial, Timi? oara (2019, 2024); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2023, solo); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Museum Tinguely, Basel (2022); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2021); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2021); Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2021); EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial (2020); MUCEM, Marseille (2019); MUMOK, Vienna (2017); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2016); Vienna Biennale at MAK, Vienna (2015); Off-Biennale Budapest (2015, 2017); Kunsthalle Wien (2014); the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); and La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).
They are recipients of the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize (2022) and Creative Fellows at UCL’s Centre for Postsocialist Art, London (2023).
As part of the interview series, a conversation with Venice Biennale artists, Abirpothi, featuring Romanian artist duo Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán. The artist discusses in detail their work and their presence in the Venice Biennale.
Q: Why does your practice often look at military infrastructure, resource exploitation, and ecological change impact landscapes? Are you using ‘Black Seas: Scores for the Sonic Eye’ to connect these topics at the Venice Biennale?
Benera+ Estefan: We are intrigued by how landscapes are shaped by political decisions, economic interests, technological systems, and histories of conflict; they are never simply passive settings. And the Black Sea is one of those places where all these dynamics converge with particular intensity: a strategic military zone, a corridor for energy extraction and trade, and a fragile ecosystem undergoing profound environmental change.
Back in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, perceptions of Eastern Europe shifted overnight. The logic of the Cold War, which many believed had been left behind after 1989, suddenly re-emerged. At the time, we were working on a commissioned video for the Kyiv Biennial, during which we began exploring the entanglements among geography, ecology, and military infrastructure. Then, in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the central role of the Black Sea became impossible to ignore. It emerged not only as a heavily militarised zone and a frontier of oil and gas extraction, but also as an ecosystem under immense pressure. The blockade of Ukrainian ports also revealed how profoundly interconnected the region is with the rest of the world. By disrupting one of the world’s most important grain-export corridors, the war reshaped global food supply chains, exposing how a conflict in the Black Sea reverberates far beyond its own shores.
We do not approach the Black Sea as distant observers. It is also a place we know personally. One of us was born in Constanța, Romania’s largest port city on the Black Sea, so our engagement with the region is not only geopolitical and historical but also biographical. So, the Black Sea is part of our own lived experience, making the questions we ask both analytical and deeply personal.
We felt that our work naturally fit within the Minor Keys framework. Koyo Kouoh’s invitation to listen to the quieter frequencies through which histories, ecologies, and lived experiences are carried resonated deeply with our own approach. Black Seas: Scores for the Sonic Eye likewise understands the Black Sea not as a single subject but as a constellation of intertwined histories, infrastructures, memories, and environments.
Q: Do you consider your project a completion of a long study trajectory or the beginning of a new way of thinking about geopolitical landscapes?
Benera+ Estefan: Neither, really. It’s more of a hinge than either an ending or a beginning. We don’t see this project as the conclusion of a long research trajectory. Rather, it brings together questions we have been working on for years while opening a new direction. Since around 2015, much of our practice has explored how landscapes are produced—who shapes them, through which forces, and whose presence or absence becomes embedded within them.
Black Seas grows directly out of that ongoing inquiry, but it also shifts our perspective. For the first time, sound becomes the primary material through which the work unfolds, and the sea replaces the land as the central territory of investigation. Water asks different questions. It resists fixed borders, conceals more than it reveals, and carries histories that are often sensed rather than seen. In that sense, the project closes one cycle, namely the engagement with forests, borders, and terrestrial landscapes, while opening another, centred on depth, fluidity, and the invisible infrastructures that shape the Black Sea. It is less a destination than a threshold into another way of listening to geopolitical landscapes.
Q: Are you using this project to merge the borders that emerge as ecological, legal, and psychological creations rather than as permanent lines on maps? What can be learned about the modern political borders from the Black Sea?
Benera+ Estefan: The Black Sea made us realise how interconnected the world has become. Eastern Europe is one of the world’s major grain-producing regions, and the blockade of Black Sea ports following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 demonstrated how a conflict between neighbouring states can rapidly disrupt global food supply chains. The Black Sea also reminds us that borders are much more fluid than the fixed lines we draw on maps. They move with currents, sediments, shipping routes, military infrastructures, and economic interests. Pollution, for example, does not recognise maritime boundaries. It travels with the water, just as migratory fish, underwater noise, or oil spills do. In this sense, ecology constantly challenges the political imagination of the nation-state. But we don’t address borders in a literal or illustrative way in the exhibition. Instead, they are present as an underlying condition. The title Black Seas (in the plural) suggests that there is no single Black Sea but many overlapping seas, each shaped by distinct political, ecological, military, and economic realities. What appears to be one body of water is, in fact, a dense network of jurisdictions, extraction zones, migration routes, and competing narratives.
Q: Are you claiming that the landscapes are never unbiased but rather products of war, legislation, exploitation, and governmental authority? What obligations do artists have in disclosing these secret histories when official narratives typically naturalise or erase them?
Benera+ Estefan: We would say that landscapes are often the result of political decisions—a treaty, a concession, a military campaign, or an extraction project—that, over time, become absorbed into what we simply call “nature.” As vegetation grows back or infrastructures become part of the everyday environment, the traces of violence gradually disappear from view. We have always been interested in landscapes produced by conflict, extraction, or political will. Because official narratives tend to naturalise these processes: a border becomes “just geography,” a mine becomes “just industry,” a military road becomes “just infrastructure.” Yet each of these carries a history of decisions, negotiations, and power relations.
We wouldn’t want to speak on behalf of artists in general, but for us, the task is not to replace one official narrative with another. Nor is it simply about exposing hidden truths. It is about slowing down the way we look and making visible the layers that coexist within a place, and restoring that complexity to what has often been flattened into common sense. Art cannot rewrite history, but it can make us more attentive to the political, ecological, and economic forces that continue to shape the landscapes we inhabit.
Q: What is the listening part of your project, as the book Scores for the Sonic Eye suggests listening as a method of knowledge? Why has sound become such a significant political and artistic language?
Benera+ Estefan: Listening is central to the project because we believe it changes how we relate to the world. Vision often encourages distance—we stand back, frame, and observe. Listening is different. It requires proximity, attention, and an openness to what we cannot fully grasp or control. It asks us to become aware of what usually remains in the background, in our case, underwater infrastructures, ecological transformations, political histories, and the many forms of life that coexist beneath the surface. The sea itself reinforces this way of thinking. Sound travels about 4 to 5 times faster underwater than through air, making it a space understood primarily through acoustics. And also, listening is never about simply receiving sound. It is an act of attention, of relation, of acknowledging that the world exceeds what we can see. This also implies vulnerability: when you listen, you cannot fully control what reaches you. Listening is therefore never simply about receiving sound. It is a practice of attention that allows us to sense relationships, histories, and forms of presence that escape visual representation. The sonic eye is therefore a metaphor. It suggests the possibility of “seeing” through sound.
Q: Could you explain the pavilion’s concept of “The Black Sea(s) is not a geography but a condition”? What is the significance of this state outside of the Black Sea, especially in light of the current interrelated political and ecological crises?
Benera+ Estefan: We use the plural Black Seas quite deliberately because there is no singular Black Sea. It is far more than a place on a map. Today, it is simultaneously a militarised zone, a site of resource extraction, a fragile ecosystem, a migration route, and a repository of memory. Its present condition speaks far beyond its own shores. The Black Sea makes visible a broader reality: political and ecological crises cannot be understood separately. Military conflict, resource extraction, environmental degradation, migration, and infrastructure are deeply intertwined. These are not conditions unique to the Black Sea, but part of a wider pattern that can be recognised in many other parts of the world.
The plural Black Seas reflects this way of thinking. It does not describe multiple seas, but multiple, overlapping realities that converge in one place while resonating across many others. It acknowledges both connection and difference, revealing how distant geographies are entangled without ever becoming identical.
Q: How can someone understand the ongoing project in light of your older projects? Does Black Seas carry on this criticism by challenging us to reconsider not just territory but also who has the right to define it?
Benera+ Estefan: We see Black Seas as part of a longer trajectory in our practice. We have always been interested in landscapes not as neutral settings but as political constructions shaped by military, economic, ecological, and technological forces. What changes in Black Seas is not the question itself, but the landscape through which we ask it. Much of our earlier work focused on land and on the visible traces of power inscribed in forests, borders, infrastructure, and ruins. The sea required us to rethink those questions. It asks us to look not only across territory but also through its depths, where infrastructures, extraction, military technologies, and ecological transformations often remain hidden from view.
In earlier projects, such as No Shelter from the Storm, produced for the Kyiv Biennial in 2015, we examined the primaeval forests along the Romanian–Ukrainian border, where multinational logging operations revealed how ecological, political, economic, and military interests become entangled within the same landscape. Around the same period, we developed the concept of the Debrisphere and published a book exploring landscape as an extension of the military imagination, in which ruins, infrastructure, extraction, and waste form part of a single spatial logic.
Black Seas extends these questions into another territory. Instead of forests, we work with the sea; instead of traces that remain visible on the surface, we engage with what lies beneath it. The project explores how power is exercised through infrastructure, extraction, military technologies, and ecological transformation, and how these forces become embedded in the landscape, appearing almost natural. The sea is a place where much of this remains invisible, yet it profoundly shapes the world above it.
Q: Where are the lines between scientific inquiry, historical analysis, artistic conjecture, and political criticism that are always blurred in your work?. How do you negotiate the balance between factual information and lyrical imagination without allowing one to weaken the other?
Benera+ Estefan: We don’t really experience these as separate domains that need balancing. Research is never the opposite of imagination. Quite often, it is what compels us to imagine differently. Our projects usually begin with historical archives, scientific data, legal documents, technical manuals, or fieldwork. These are not simply sources to illustrate. They shape the questions we ask. At the same time, they also reveal their own limits. There are experiences, temporalities, and relationships that cannot be fully captured by facts alone. This is where art becomes necessary—not to invent another reality, but to shift perspective and make different connections visible. For example, the Black Sea’s oxygen-free deep layer, which can preserve organic matter for thousands of years, is a scientific fact. For us, it also suggests another way of thinking about history: not as something that disappears, but as something that can remain suspended, waiting for the conditions under which it might resurface. We are not interested in replacing facts with fiction, nor in illustrating research. Scientific knowledge gives the work its structure, while artistic imagination expands its field of meaning. Facts tell us what there is; art asks what else becomes visible once we begin looking and listening, from another perspective.
Q: According to you, in what ways can working with geological time change our perception of current political issues, which are frequently defined solely in terms of recent events?
Benera+ Estefan: Contemporary politics is often experienced through the urgency of the present, as in the cycles of news, elections, political conflicts, and economic crises. Working with geological time shifts that perspective. It doesn’t make these events less important, but it places them within a different scale. Political borders, conflicts, or extraction projects that appear permanent from a human perspective become relatively brief episodes when viewed through geological or ecological time. At the same time, their consequences, whether preserved in sediments, biodiversity, or atmospheric change, can persist for centuries or even millennia. If one looks at the present through the perspective of a mineral, a pollen grain, a diatom, or dormant algae lying on the seabed, one would see the world differently. These are not poetic inventions but scientific proxies, forms of evidence that allow us to reconstruct climates and environments that disappeared thousands of years ago. They remind us that the Earth records history differently than we do. This shift in scale changes the kinds of questions we ask. It makes us see today’s political decisions not as isolated events but as processes that will continue to shape landscapes long after we are gone.
Q: Does your work suggest a different kind of politics in which the non-human world is no longer merely a resource but an engaged political subject?
Benera+ Estefan: One can put it that way and ask what politics might become if the non-human world is no longer treated as background or resource. Because seas, sediments, animals, currents, and atmospheres are not silent matter. They act, remember, resist, and transform history. What would it take to treat the sea, or any landscape, as something with its own claim on the present, rather than only a space to be governed, extracted from, or fought over?
Q: What intrigues you about this project? Whether it is through conflict-shaped landscapes or, in this case, sonar itself, military technology is present in your work.
Benera+ Estefan: What fascinates us is that so much of the way we perceive the world—how we see it, hear it, measure it, and map it—has its origins in military research. Because we are now speaking about the sea, sonar is perhaps the clearest example. It was not developed by marine biologists trying to understand the ocean. It emerged during the First World War as a technology for detecting submarines. The desire to listen into the depths, to locate what remained hidden beneath the surface, was initially driven by warfare. Only later was the same technology redirected toward science: mapping the seafloor, studying marine ecosystems, and expanding our understanding of the ocean.
This pattern extends far beyond sonar. Radar, GPS, satellite imaging, the internet, and even many developments in nuclear physics all began as military technologies before becoming scientific tools or part of everyday civilian life. In other words, much of our knowledge of the world has been shaped by infrastructures originally designed for conflict. We are interested in this genealogy because it challenges the idea that technologies are ever neutral. Every tool carries with it a history, a set of intentions, and a particular way of seeing the world. Military technology is, therefore, not simply one of the subjects of our work; it is often the hidden origin of the very instruments through which contemporary landscapes become visible, measurable, and knowable.
Q: Do you believe that authority in the modern era increasingly functions through what is hidden rather than what is readily apparent? Could you comment on the tension between visibility and invisibility that often arises in your work?
Benera+ Estefan: We would say that power today often operates through systems that remain largely invisible. It is embedded in infrastructures, legal frameworks, extraction networks, logistics, algorithms, or military technologies that quietly organise everyday life. Their effects are tangible, but the mechanisms themselves often remain out of sight. This is why the tension between visibility and invisibility has become so important in our work. We are not interested in revealing hidden truths or exposing secret conspiracies. Rather, we are interested in making perceptible the relationships that usually remain below the threshold of ordinary perception. Sometimes these are physical structures lying beneath the sea; sometimes they are historical processes buried within a landscape; sometimes they are ecological transformations unfolding too slowly to be noticed. They all share the same condition: they shape the world profoundly without necessarily becoming visible. Therefore, we do not aim to make the invisible visible but create situations in which we begin to sense connections between things that usually appear unrelated. In that sense, our work is less about revealing the invisible than about expanding the field of what can be perceived.
Q: How can you represent a ‘nation’ itself while challenging the concepts of territory, sovereignty, and national identity?
Benera+ Estefan: The pavilion system itself was created at a moment when nation-states were using culture to construct and project national identity. More than a century later, we find ourselves in a very different political moment, yet one in which nationalism is once again becoming increasingly present. That inevitably changes the way we think about representing a country.
Rather than trying to produce an image of Romania as a fixed territory or identity, we chose to begin from its relationships. The Black Sea cannot be understood from the perspective of a single nation. It is a shared space shaped by overlapping histories, ecological systems, migration routes, military infrastructures, and resource extraction. No country can claim it as its own.
In that sense, representing Romania through the Black Sea also means representing everything that exceeds the nation itself. It means acknowledging that landscapes, waters, and infrastructures are always shared, even when political borders insist otherwise. That felt like a more honest way to represent a nation through what it’s entangled with, rather than what it claims to contain. We see the pavilion less as a stage for national representation and more as a space where that representation can turn self-critical, unsettled, a place that asks what a nation even means.
Q: What do you learn from your research that frequently reveals histories that link seemingly disparate locations from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, from combat zones to ecological systems, from Eastern Europe to international networks of extraction? Is the outcome only art?
Benera+ Estefan: One thing we learn again and again is that places we usually think of as separate are, in fact, deeply connected. A grain shipment leaving the Black Sea, a pipeline crossing the Mediterranean, a military conflict, a polluted river, or a migratory bird may all belong to the same network of political, ecological, and economic relations. We aim to make these connections visible, while also reminding that no landscape exists in isolation.
Scientific or other reports, of all kinds, about these troubled waters already exist. Our contribution is different. What do you mean by “the outcome is only art”? For us, art is another way of producing knowledge. We think art’s strength lies in its ability to move across disciplines, bringing together facts, memories, affects, and imagination in ways that reveal connections a single discipline might overlook.
Q: What would you hope visitors would take away from the Romanian Pavilion if they were to leave with one unanswered question?
Benera+ Estefan: The question: How to mend a broken sea / a fractured world? It is the seed from which the whole project grew. We do not use the sea as a metaphor that stands outside the world. For us, the Black Sea is a place where the world becomes legible. Military conflict, ecological transformation, resource extraction, migration, and memory converge there in ways that reveal broader global conditions. A sea under ecological and political strain and a world under the same strain are not separate realities but different expressions of the same condition.
The question, then, is not simply how to mend the Black Sea. It asks how we might remain attentive to a world where ecological and political fractures have become inseparable. Rather than offering answers, we hope the exhibition creates the conditions for these questions to continue resonating with visitors long after they leave the pavilion.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
