Florentina Holzinger: SEAWORLD VENICE The choreographer and performer will represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale

Choreographer and performer Florentina Holzinger will represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale with the interdisciplinary project SEAWORLD VENICE, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin). The project will consist of a permanent live installation in the Austrian Pavilion and a series of site-specific Études spread across Venice and its lagoon.

Known for work that questions artistic genres and socio-political conventions, Holzinger has for years been developing research on water, understood both as a physical element and as a symbol. In this project, the artist explores the human body within an ever-changing environment, where nature and technology intertwine in increasingly complex ways. Moving between dance, theater, opera and performance, Holzinger combines strong physicality with rigorous stage construction. Her works fuse languages of “high” culture with pop and countercultural influences, challenging the boundaries between entertainment and radical critique. The body thus becomes the site of tensions, resistance and extremes, making tangible dynamics of power and transformation.

SEAWORLD VENICE stems from this research and is configured as a work in direct dialogue with Venice, a city deeply marked by its relationship with water, its fragility and the consequences of human intervention. Water is evoked in multiple forms: as a vital resource, as a cyclical element of the human body, as an environment to be traversed and as a controlled system. The project is conceived as an underwater theme park, a sewage treatment plant, and a sacred building: a mechanical organism inhabited by perfomers for the duration of the Biennale Arte 2026

Through powerful and often disturbing images, Holzinger constructs a narrative intended to highlight the vulnerability of bodies and the systems in which they move, suggesting an almost apocalyptic scenario that reflects a crisis already underway. “Florentina Holzinger,” the curator explains, “paints an apocalyptic scenario that is already present, illustrating humanity’s complicity in a collapsing (eco)system: lives lived among the rubble of others. Fleeting images and compositions that haunt us, bordering on the impossible. It radically expands what is considered possible: a contagious mindset we need now more than ever.”

Translated from Italian into English