WHAT IS "SEAWORLD VENICE"? THE INSTALLATION AT THE BIENNALE THAT STAGES ECOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL COLLAPSE

The Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger (Vienna, Austria, 1986) represents Austria at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with SEAWORLD VENICE, a bold new interdisciplinary commission curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin). Known for her genre-defying work that challenges socio-political conventions, Holzinger conceptualises the Austrian Pavilion as, at once, a sacred building, an underwater theme park and a sewage treatment plant.

Visitors' bodily fluids are turned into living quarters for performers inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion, while also actively contributing to the pavilion's flooding. Holzinger's work takes the form of a machinic organism in which action and its consequences are continuously negotiated, exploring the body within a radically changing landscape where nature and technology collide. The project features a permanent live installation at the Austrian Pavilion, alongside site-specific Études — an ongoing body of work the artist has been developing since 2020, consisting of performative actions in public space.

SEAWORLD VENICE derives from this ongoing enquiry, entering into dialogue with Venice, a city defined by its entanglement with water, survival and the consequences of human intervention. Holzinger explores concepts of purity and impurity, cleanliness and dirt, which are integral both to the water world and to societal and religious belief systems. Purification cycles and rituals are deemed necessary to restore order. Here, the artist makes these visible and proposes that order itself is unstable.

The Opening Étude serves as an inaugural ritual. Recovered from the lagoon and brought to the Pavilion in a procession, a bell opens the Austrian Pavilion and towers over its entrance. The rhythmic, embodied persistence of a female performer replacing the clapper rings out the exhausted structures of patriarchal history and religious authority every hour.

In the flooded pavilion, a jet ski makes its rounds as a monument to the ecological catastrophe driven by turbotourism, which continues to collide with a sinking city. Opposite, a monumental weather vane pierces the architecture. Here, it substitutes the fixed monuments of the past with a rotating, female-led "Deposition of Christ." The work proposes a radical departure from the status quo, foreshadowing a defiant direction for a society in flux.

At the back of the pavilion, the promise of progress continues to unfold as a "Frankensteinesque" dystopia: robot dogs move through rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical watchdogs for a central sacrificial altar — a large aquarium flanked by toilets. In the courtyard, a performer lives inside a water tank sustained by visitors' urine, inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion continuously throughout the Biennale. Living in this reservoir, the performer strips away the inherited romanticism of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1510) — art history's first known reclining nude, painted in Venice.

Rising from the depths of the Venetian lagoon and ascending into the city's skies, Holzinger's performers — human and otherwise — reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike. The artist states: "In Venice — a city caught in a profound and precarious relationship with water — my ongoing fascination with this element will take on new dimensions. Here, the body will play a central role in exploring the interdependence and interplay between nature and technology."

SEAWORLD VENICE is on view through 22 November at Giardini della Biennale, Sestiere Castello, 30122 Venice, Italy.