At PUNTA Gallery and Spiaggia Libera in Varna, Odyssea: Le sel de la terre gathers six French and Bulgarian artists around a single corrosive substance — salt as temporal agent, preservative and solvent at once.

Curated by Boyana Dzhikova, Camille Velluet, and Sacha Guedj Cohen, the exhibition assembles six artists from the French and Bulgarian scenes — Elvire Menetrier, Marilou Poncin, Nina Boughanim, Petja Ivanova, Todor Rabadzhiyski, and Valentin Vert — around a single organizing substance: salt. Corrosive and purifying, salt is proposed here as a temporal agent, a medium through which the past is crystallized and the future is left illegible.

The exhibition begins at a threshold. Following an earlier iteration at the BUNA Festival in Varna, this presentation proposes a different order of time — one that is not linear history but what the curators call a narrative of anticipation. Works unfold across piles of charred debris scattered through the gallery, a landscape of post-combustion where six radically different material languages attempt to speak simultaneously. The effect is less a group show than a shared geological event.

Elvire Menetrier presents a series of latex bas-reliefs cast directly into the cavities of a salvaged car hood, the industrial panel suspended from the ceiling like a votive offering from another civilization. The reliefs are flesh-toned, their surfaces dense with mythological imagery — winged figures, anatomical maps, keyboards — as if two technological eras had been compressed into a single fossil. The latex is pliable, body-warm in its pinkness, resisting the coldness of the metal that frames it. There is something genuinely unsettling about the pairing: the car body as archaeological container, the body's own imagery pressed into its infrastructure.

Marilou Poncin's contribution occupies the walls with a quieter violence. Her chitin-based fabric sculptures — derived from insect waste — are installed as minimal interventions: white wire-like forms emerging from plaster surfaces, a delicate flora that could be mistaken for an organic growth. Chitin, the structural material of exoskeletons, carries an implicit argument about what we consider waste and what we consider resource. Poncin's practice sits in that gap, proposing forms that are neither decorative nor documentary but somewhere between a specimen and a breath.

Nina Boughanim works in two registers simultaneously: a large-scale oil painting and a fiber installation. The painting is almost confrontational in its scale and palette — a deep nocturnal blue-black ground from which a surgical or ritual scene emerges, hands in latex gloves pulling at luminous white material while something wing-like tears upward from beneath. The image is neither medical nor theological but arrives at both. Alongside it, Boughanim installs a chitin-based woven work, golden hair cascading from a wooden box with a glass vessel, as if archiving some intimate biological residue. The pairing suggests a practice interested in what the body produces and what it might become.

Petja Ivanova's works occupy three distinct modes within the show. The lead-based silver white pigment pieces mounted on the wall cluster like a constellation of eroded objects — small, dense, metallic — their surfaces somewhere between geological and intestinal. A separate group of chitin-based ceramic works descends the wall in a column, each form a different stage of material deformation: coral-like, oxidized, in shades of blue, green, and amber. And a series of face-like dark metallic forms, deeply shadowed, introduce something that reads as portraiture from an indeterminate civilization. The range is deliberate: Ivanova is interested in how matter registers transformation across registers of scale and meaning.

Todor Rabadzhiyski contributes a sculptural assembly built around an industrial oil lamp mounted atop a base of charred debris — asphalt gravel blackened and compressed — with rubber hoses looping outward from a steel armature. It reads as a hybrid between a beacon and an extraction apparatus, something that would power illumination by consuming the earth beneath it. The work anchors the show's material argument in industrial history without becoming illustrative of it: what Rabadzhiyski stages is an object that still functions, that still lights, even as its substrate is visibly spent.

Valentin Vert's amphorae emerge from a mound of charred black debris like archaeological finds from a recent catastrophe. The vessels are formed in amber-toned resin, inscribed with hand-written text — something archival and intimate is preserved inside the storage form itself. The choice of amphora is pointed: the Mediterranean vessel of transport and containment, here entombed in contemporary industrial waste. What does it mean to store memory in a form that requires excavation to be read? Vert's work asks this without resolving it.

The exhibition explores a shared vocabulary around the relationship between organic matter, ecological systems, and contemporary existence — connecting French and Bulgarian artistic practices through the Mediterranean symbol of salt as both corrosive force and preserving agent.