Florentina Holzinger’s Viral Venice Show Heads to Berlin

Florentina Holzinger b. 1986, Austria Follow +

At the Austrian pavilion during the opening week of this year’s Venice Biennale, Florentina Holzinger had everyone lining up to piss and cringing at the sight of damaged human flesh. Now, the choreographer’s viral project, Seaworld Venice (Working Title), is set to head Berlin’s Gropius Bau.

The work draws on Holzinger’s research into ecological catastrophe and bodily impurity. At the biennale, Seaworld fills the Austrian pavilion with water, turning it into a theme park with a fully functional sewage treatment plant. Visitors to the show are invited to urinate in portable toilets; their bodily fluids are then cleaned and cycled back into the tanks. 

A text accompanying the pavilion asks: “I live in your piss. Whose wet dream is this?” It continues: “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.”

The show made headlines throughout the biennale’s preview days last week, thanks in part to its naked women performers—one riding around a tank inside the Austrian pavilion on a jet ski, another submerged in a vat of water. Videos of Holzinger herself, swinging from a large metal bell in the place of a pendulum, also did the rounds on social media.

At another of the show’s multiple performance locations across both the Arsenale and the Giardini, a woman is hung from a large military ship crane arm through metal hooks placed in her skin, while a second performer plays the electric guitar. 

Holzinger’s project was developed alongside Nora-Swantje Almes, curator of live programmes at Gropius Bau. Her presentation at the Berlin space—programmed in advance of it’s recent virality—will be an adaptation of the work presented in Venice. Can the biennale’s most talked-about work achieve viral success for a second time?