“It was a spectacularly good day—the birthday of an artist, the Persian New Year, the beginning of spring, and the opening day of the Magic Gathering Golden Cat Festival in Gabrovo,” recalls Snejana Krasteva, one of the curators of the 26th Gabrovo Biennial, during a dinner celebrating its imagined opening in 2029.

In his installation, Luka Cvetković reconstructs this future moment years before it takes place. The project stages a collective dinner on March 19, 2026, where participating artists deliver speeches as if speaking from the future, reflecting on imagined global conditions—ecology, geopolitics, and human rights—interwoven with personal narratives of love, family, success, and loss. Presented as “preserved” notes of speeches, snapshots of the celebratory events, these elements function as a temporal short circuit, collapsing past, present, and future.

Inspired by Bulgarian folklore surrounding clairvoyant sites and figures such as Baba Vanga, the work draws a parallel between prophetic vision and artistic intuition. Rather than treating the future as something to be predicted, it proposes that art may actively shape the conditions from which futures emerge. The project suggests that thinking about the future may resemble an act of memory—remembering events that are yet to take place.

text by Snejana Krasteva