Seaworld Venice  

Water, levels rising; water that we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water to plunge into, dive into, and emerge from, perhaps transformed.

Underwater amusement park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building all in one, SEAWORLD VENICE complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation, making visible the waste that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present. Turning visitors’ bodily fluids—our very own organic rubbish—into living quarters for performers inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion, this seaworld takes the form of a machinic organism in which action and its consequence on the body are continuously negotiated.

A church bell towers over the pavilion: a signifier of the sacred, a marker of the passing of time, a call to gather, a warning. The rhythmic, embodied persistence of a female* performer replacing the clapper rings out the exhausted structures of patriarchal history and religious authority, tolling instead for a world increasingly surrendered to the waves. The pavilion is flooded. A jet ski makes its rounds as a monument to the ecological catastrophe driven by turbo-tourism, which continues to collide with a sinking city. The giant weathervane pierces the architecture, substituting the fixed monuments of the past with a rotating, female-led “Deposition of Christ.” This symbol of holy descent transforms into a revolving monument of collective strength, as the figures spin in the shifting winds—a radical departure from the status quo, foreshadowing a defiant direction for a society in flux.

In SEAWORLD VENICE, the promise of progress unfolds as a “Frankensteinesque” dystopia: robot dogs wade through the rising water behind glass, acting as mechanical Cerberuses guarding a central sacrificial altar. Here, a performer lives within a tank sustained by body fluids contributed by the audience. This closed-loop recycling system serves as a raw metaphor for a life lived in the refuse of others—a visceral reflection of a global order in which vulnerable populations and entire nations are relegated to the trash bins of the powerful. Living in this reservoir of waste, the performer strips away the inherited romanticism of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. She is no longer a silent muse resting on velvet, but a future biological survivor staring out from the wreckage of a civilization dissolved in piss. The “beauty” sought in Venice is inseparable from the filth left behind.

The (eco)system has gone out of control. Flooding caused by mankind, lives lived in the waste of others, robotic hellhounds leading the way into the future. Rituals are deemed necessary—not to cleanse but to confront—and so the dirt must be summoned.*Marin Sanudo, 1466-1536, as cited in Giovanni Distefano, How Was Venice Built? (Supernova, 2014)