“Venice is in water, but has no water.”*
Water, levels rising; water, which we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, perhaps transformed. Blending dance, theatre, and performance, the Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger uses her long-standing research into the element of water—as both subject and symbol—as a point of departure for an exploration of the human body in a radically changing landscape, in which nature and technology collide.
The Austrian Pavilion becomes a machinic organism, in which action and its consequence on the body are negotiated. Underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building, all in one, SEAWORLD VENICE complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation; and renders visible the rubbish that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present.
SEAWORLD VENICE expands across the city through site-specific performances in water, air, and land. The series of experimental formats that Holzinger has been developing since 2020, titled Études, consists of site-specific choreographic exercises and performative actions in public space. Rising from the depths of the lagoon, where turbo-tourism’s rubbish lays to rest, and ascending into the city’s skies, Holzinger’s performers—human and otherwise—reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike.
Holzinger’s feminist premise and the extreme physicality of her practice form an analogy and texture for visualising an (eco)system that has gone out of control. Rituals are deemed necessary to restore order, and so the dirt must be summoned: fleeting images and compositions that haunt us, edging the impossible.
Floodings caused by mankind, lives lived in the waste of others, robotic hellhounds that lead the way into the future. I live in your piss. Whose wet dream is this?
— Nora-Swantje Almes
*Marin Sanudo, 1466-1536, as cited in Giovanni Distefano, How Was Venice Built? (Supernova, 2014)