Seaworld Venice
Commissioner: The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport - Republic of Austria
Curator: Nora-Swantje Almes
Exhibitor: Florentina Holzinger
Venue: Giardini
From 30 September to 22 November, the Austrian Pavilion follows these opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 5 pm, with last admission at 4:45 pm.
Daily performances run continuously throughout the Pavilion’s opening hours, from 10 am to 5 pm.
Water, with rising levels; water, which we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and a 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 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.
Turning visitors’ bodily fluids into environments for the performers inhabiting the Austrian Pavilion, Holzinger proposes an installation in the form of a machinic organism, in which action and its consequences on the body are negotiated. Underwater amusement 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.
With an (eco)system out of control, rituals are deemed necessary to restore order, and so the dirt must be summoned. Floodings caused by human action, 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?
