Florentina Holzinger’s Naked Ambition Onward and Upward with the Arts

By Lauren Oyler

It was the day before the press preview for the Venice Biennale, and the toilets at the Austrian pavilion were broken. In Venice, plumbing problems are routine; the city doesn’t have a modern sewage system, so it relies on its canals and the tides to flush out wastewater treated in thousands of septic tanks. A heavy rain can flood the streets, and private bathrooms. But the two bright-blue porta-potties were not here for convenience. They were part of an installation opening the next day.

Between the toilets, Florentina Holzinger was naked, in a decent-sized tank of water, maintaining a defiant, full-frontal pose, wearing a diving mask and breathing through a scuba. A steady stream of bubbles was making chunks of her long hair float straight up. Occasionally, her left pinkie twitched. Otherwise, she barely moved. The water contained urine from the porta-potties that had been filtered through a system visible beneath the tank. “It is maintained by the pee of the people,” Giulia Messia, Holzinger’s publicity manager, explained. “But no shitting.”