Decentring artistic practice beyond national narratives. An analysis of the European pavilion as a post-national model

Background The national pavilion model, epitomised by the Venice Biennale, functions as an internal cultural border that aligns artistic production with state sovereignty and Eurocentric universality. This representational framework fails to accommodate contemporary, mobile, and post-national artistic practices. To explore an alternative paradigm, this article evaluates Liquid Becomings, a 2024 waterborne project commissioned by the European Cultural Foundation. Navigating four major European rivers—the Danube, Rhine, Vistula, and Tagus—this itinerant civic laboratory sought to test how a post-national community might be lived through fluid, non-extractive practices. Methods This study employs a qualitative, interdisciplinary methodology bridging contemporary curatorial critique with decolonial theory and political geography. Utilizing the framework of the institutional archive versus the embodied repertoire, the empirical analysis juxtaposes official curatorial materials, manifestoes, and video documentation from the four river routes against ex-post reflective accounts of the project’s final transition to a land-bound festival in Lisbon. Results The river residencies successfully disrupted state-centric visual regimes by shifting the locus of enunciation onto mobile platforms. The routes reconceptualized European borders through decolonial delinking, relational opacity, hydrofeminist ecology, and human-powered navigation. However, translating these slow, somatic, and non-representational practices into an urban festival in Lisbon generated significant structural friction, revealing a fundamental disconnect between the transient embodied repertoire of the river journeys and the spectacle-driven expectations of land-based cultural institutions. Conclusions The study concludes that the material absence, insularity, and spatial diffusion observed at the Lisbon festival do not represent operational failures. Synthesising participatory aesthetics, the distribution of the sensible, and agonistic pluralism, the article demonstrates that these frictions constitute a radical aesthetic of withdrawal that evades institutional capture and resists state-sanctioned narratives of European identity.