The European Pavilion: Reflections on a Collective Journey

In the text below Lore Gablier, ECF’s Programme Manager of The European Pavilion – and co-curator of both The European Pavilion podcast and the 2022 edition in Rome – looks back at The European Pavilion editions.

This reflection was originally published in our 2025 annual magazine, Common Ground.

Under the evocative title Liquid Becomings, the 2024 edition of The European Pavilion saw four artistic crews navigating sustainable boats along four of Europe’s most significant water nodes – the Danube, the Vistula, the Rhine and the Tagus.
Throughout the journey, 33 artists immersed themselves in the landscapes, histories and communities they encountered, gathering notes, drawings, images, objects, materials, sounds, and rituals. After completing their respective sails, all the crews gathered in Lisbon from 7 to 9 November for an interdisciplinary festival spanning from the old port of Beato to the Marvila neighbourhood. The programme was staged in various locations, including a former football club, the gym of a neighbourhood middle school, a library, an old palace turned into a cultural community space, and the hilly streets in between. It brought together local artists and musicians, a queer colletive, pupils and performers representing the many communities inhabiting the Portuguese capital.

While the rivers served as living laboratories for the artists, the Lisbon festival became a space where their encounters and reflections could expand, intersect and take new forms. The European Pavilion 2024: Liquid Becomings under scored the value of shared experiences – finding strength in the ongoing dialogue between diverse perspectives, histories and identities.

Since its inception in 2019, The European Pavilion has been a platform for artistic and intellectual exploration of Europe. It began as a podcast2 before expanding into a grant programme that supported ten cultural organisations and collectives, whose artistic researches and projects culminated in a first European Pavilion in Rome in 2022.

In 2023, we took a significant step by launching an open call and awarding a major commissioning grant for the curation of the 2024 edition. This reaffirmed our belief in The European Pavilion’s potential to spark dialogue, and sure enough, the call drew many outstanding curatorial proposals – amplifying unheard voices, questioning Europe’s (mental) borders, and rethinking the role of arts institutions against the backdrop of the climate crisis. Taken together, these proposals reflected a shared commitment to listening, learning and imagining new ways for possible Europes to come.

As the Programme Manager of The European Pavilion – and co-curator of both The European Pavilion Podcast and the 2022 edition in Rome – I have spent considerable time reflecting on this idea. From the outset, I was drawn to the notion of the pavilion because of the paradox it embodies: On the one hand, it has historically contributed to the establishment of aesthetic canons and display practices that shaped the imagined and enduring world of nation-states. On the other, its inherent openness as an architectural form invites continual questioning and reinvention. I have often wondered whether those we call the architects of Europe – Schuman and his contemporaries – ever envisioned a pavilion, and if so, how they would have built it – if indeed they envisioned walls at all.

What I have taken away from these past years, and what was reinforced through my experience accompanying the production of Liquid Becomings, is that Europe cannot be reduced to a consensus, nor captured in a single image, story or structure. Its meaning shifts depending on where one stands, which is precisely why it remains so elusive. To truly engage with it, one must take unexpected routes – less-traveled byways or, as in Liquid Becomings, follow the rivers.

In Lisbon, Europe was not the main protagonist – at least not explicitly. Instead, we learned about the resilience of its plants and wildlife. We listened to the stories of those who attempt to cross its waters and celebrated the poets and writers who drowned in them. We drew on its folk rituals and got carried by rhythms from distant shores that now beat at the heart of Europe. All of this spoke to a deeper notion of togetherness – or, more precisely, the collective journey. And it was, above all, a shared physical experience: bodies gathering, moving and sensing in relation to one another, shaping meaning beyond words.

Journeying together is rarely smooth – it is unpredictable, challenging and shaped by shifting goals and sudden urgencies. Sailing Europe’s rivers was both intended as a parable for Europe and a research methodology. As the journeys unfolded, the artists found themselves immersed in daily realities: constant negotiations, inevitable frictions and unexpected discoveries. And isn’t that also true of Europe? We set out with a purpose, yet time and again, we lose sight of it, absorbed instead by the sheer complexity of moving together. Therefore, it requires skills and navigation, not simply by sight but through deeper intuition. Not an expedition in the spirit of conquest, but a drifting, a wayfinding that fosters the emergence of new ideas – ideas that can inspire change, transition, or simply the courage to move forward with a project as complex and daring as the European one. Or indeed: the coming together as a society, aware and caring.

As this chapter of The European Pavilion comes to a close, its journey continues, and its essence endures in the ideas it has generated, the collaborations it has fostered, and the friendships it has woven. The Pavilion was never meant to be a singular, static project, but rather a catalyst for thought, dialogue and creation. In the coming years, we will continue to reflect on what a European Pavilion could be and what it can bring, shaping these reflections into a publication in 2025–2026.

If The European Pavilion has taught us anything, it is that Europe is not something we inherit; it is something we create together. Even if it cannot be captured in a single image, story or structure, it must be shaped, told or carved – and sheltered within our shared imagination. And we must restlessly support artists in continuing to engage with it, to (re)imagine it.