Austria

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?