by Louise Trueheart // June 5, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Scale.
A massive shipping crane and a set of bleachers towered out of the water, moored somewhere in the middle of Venice’s lagoon. A subwoofer droned through the pouring rain, its fine plastic covering the only fragile-looking thing in sight. Bláthin Eckhardt, wearing an electric guitar, clipped their harness into the safety setup and began to climb. It was quiet, save for the buzz of anticipation aided by the rise of the conductor’s baton. At Eckhardt’s first strum, otay:onii let rip a high-volume growl that shook me warm. One of the composers, Gibrana Cervantes, was railing on her violin as Anina Machaz solemnly protected the precious wooden instrument with an umbrella. As the music picked up, the plastic on the subwoofer started to look like it wouldn’t hold. The crane pulled a brass bell out of the lagoon, engraved with the words ‘O TEMPORA, O MORES’ (Oh the times, Oh the customs!), famously spoken by Cicero as he beheld the fall of Rome.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘Opening étude: SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
This étude—the name Florentina Holzinger gives to her short and sweet, site-specific performance format—was building toward an inevitable climax. “Étude,” directly translated, means “study.” A genre emerging in the 19th century, études are short and tricky compositions made to perfect one’s musical skills, especially on the piano. That Holzinger calls this format an étude seems oxymoronic, for in my mind an étude is diminutive, a truncated version, a form “in minor keys”—to use the theme of this year’s Biennale. But when your work features things like the mid-air, group-humping of a helicopter (‘Ophelia’s Got Talent,’ 2022), for example, it makes sense that you might need to practice.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘Opening étude: SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Helena Manhartsberger
In Holzinger’s body of work, dramaturgical choices are made in service of a core largesse. They facilitate the crescendo she builds slowly, adding performers, stunts, sounds and enough political content for the stakes to feel very, very high, and then she insists further, holding it there for longer than feels possible. The crescendo warps scale; everything at play, including the most diminutive, like the plastic around the sub, starts to feel really big.
The rain-soaked, doom metal atmosphere we found ourselves in, aided by otay:onii’s piercing cries, peaked another notch when Holzinger, upside down, arms limp, in the position of the clapper, sounded the bell. The crane transported the bell and the choreographer toward Luz De Luna Duran, who had hooks fastened into the skin of their back, which were attached to a long rope that Holzinger hooked to the inside of the bell. Up Duran was pulled, a thick bead of blood running down her back toward the Venetian waters, mucky with history, below. Eckhardt and Cervantes continued to play, otay:onii continued to scream, and I started feeling pretty emotional. And then, just like that, the show was over.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘Opening étude: SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Helena Manhartsberger
Here, as in many of her pieces, Holzinger’s aforementioned core largesse is more interested in the body and what it can do than in articulating a hyper-intellectualized conceptual and political position, or in making that position legible in terms of her own personal beliefs. In short: she is a jock. Interested in the body, in training it and doing cool shit with it, she seems to thrive under the pressure of imminent danger. She makes the play when the play seems impossible to make. And, through all this, she is a team player: when Duran came down from the suspension, Holzinger crawled over the rig to give her a toothy high five, like a team captain, as if the 350 people on the floating bleachers were spectators in a stadium.
If Holzinger’s strength is the crescendo, the weakness of her stage work, in particular, is found in the quieter moments, where it often struggles to land. In the theater, I know I will delight in an ecstatic “krawall” that will peak three or four times, despite uncomfortable pauses to reload. In the Venice étude, however, Holzinger’s work benefits from not needing to navigate the comedown. The étude peaks once and is over. The valley before and after the peak is just…life.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
‘SEAWORLD VENICE’—Holzinger’s work in the Austrian pavilion—is conceived as a sewage treatment plant, which purifies water “contributed” by visitors in confessional-style port-a-potties. The pavilion is organized symmetrically, in a church-like manner. A piss-filled tank, inhabited by a solemn underwater performer, sits in the position of the altar. One moves toward it, flanked by alcoves of water purification and pollution.
At the opening, Holzinger described ‘SEAWORLD’ as a “non-spectacle.” She is right, because the climax and comedown aren’t organized the way a spectacle is organized: guided by the linearity of the stage’s relationship to time. Here, the climactic moments happen inside the visitor, who roams, reflects, urinates and creates her own experience out of the theatrical premise that we are all living in piss. ‘SEAWORLD VENICE’ is not the dramatization of the environmental crisis, as many works in the Biennale are, but an extrapolation on and poeticization of it. She makes a real thing into a fiction, underlining her complicity in it by incorporating it, and goes from there.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
There is nothing larger than what Holzinger asks of her producers, technicians and performers, except perhaps what they give back to her. It’s a complicated relationship, but not one without heart. In one of the alcoves of ‘SEAWORLD VENICE,’ there is a weathervane upon which are fixed five bronze statues of her performers enacting the “Deposition of Christ.” When I saw them, I thought: “whoa, what a love language.” The statues immortalize not just the individuals portrayed, but the unfathomable amount of labor and risk demanded of them. There they are, frozen in time, holding hands, locked into safety harnesses, holding each other in service to an even bigger picture.
Florentina Holzinger: ‘SEAWORLD VENICE,’ 2026 // Photo by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
And this is what I like most about Holzinger’s work: it’s how close it gets me to seeing the unfathomability of the big picture. Take water. It’s nearly impossible to imagine all the water in Venice, all the cubic tons that make it up. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine how many people in the world are professional toilet cleaners, a role which some performers in the pavilion played. Again, Holzinger’s use of scale bends our perception of what is a lot, what is extreme, without it being about expendable labor. Extreme things—like hanging from your skin, living in piss or doing donuts on a jet ski—are placed on the same level as the subwoofer plastic or the act of cleaning a bathroom for a living. Maybe that’s why her work struggles with the quiet and the small when she is in the theater: everything is large, and a crisis and connected. In that light, disconnecting oneself from all the noise—taking a break—might be the necessary evil. In Holzinger’s world, there is no such thing as a small thing.
Exhibition Info
Austrian Pavilion
Florentina Holzinger: ‘SEAWORLD VENICE’
Exhibition: May 9–Nov. 22, 2026
seaworldvenice.at
Giardini della Biennale, 30132 Venice, Italy, click here for map
