Florentina Holzinger CLOSING ÉTUDE

By Tessa Solomon

In piano parlance, an étude is a technically tricky piece of music typically practiced to push a musician beyond their limits. Following that logic, the name of Florentina Holzinger’s final Venice Biennale performance, CLOSING ÉTUDE, suggests that after seven months of her propriety-imploding, waste-wonderland SEAWORLD VENICE, there are feats of endurance still ahead.

Part performance, part installation, SEAWORLD VENICE opened at the Austrian Pavilion in May with the piercing peal of a colossal bell salvaged from the Venice Lagoon. In line with her body-first philosophy, a nude Holzinger served as its human clapper. The bell, sans artist, continues to mark the passage of time, ringing every hour over the pavilion and its guests, a grotesque altar to the ongoing Venetian apocalypse. Human refuse (freshly sourced) and lagoon waste, the sort that occasionally washes in with the high tide, form the material of her installation. Visitors were encouraged to use port-a-potties on site; the urine was filtered into a dunk tank.

For CLOSING ÉTUDE, the bell will travel in a ceremonial procession from the pavilion to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a historic building in Venice’s Cannaregio district. Founded in the Middle Ages as a guild, the building reopened as an exhibition space in 2015 after an architectural restoration. A soaring ceiling, a cavernous belly, and frescoes (attributed to the school of Paolo Veronese) suit the bell and the sacred tone she’s struck. Conjuring shades of Christ, CLOSING ÉTUDE is “a final dinner.”