Florentina Holzinger’s Performances across Venice

Between water, nudity and Bosch: Exhibitions impossible to ignore.

For years now, Holzinger has been a star of the European avant-garde theater world, creating epic spectacles with diverse, all-female casts. The artist has long been developing research into water, understood both as a physical element and as a symbol. In this project, she explores the human body within a constantly transforming environment, where nature and technology become increasingly intertwined. Moving between dance, theatre, opera and performance, Holzinger combines powerful physicality with rigorous scenic construction: one woman is a clapper inside a huge bell, banging it on the hour with her torso. Other performers are suspended from harnesses like gravity-defying sculptures on an immense, slowly turning weathervane. Next door is a kind of sewage station where “maintenance workers” frantically try to manage out-of-control tubes, spraying the windows with a vile-looking brown fluid. Inside the flooded pavilion, another performer jet-skis in circles at full speed. In the courtyard, visitors are invited to piss in two bright blue porta-potties flanking a massive water tank fed by the filtered urine, in which an impassive performer wearing only a scuba mask and mouthpiece remains submerged for hours at a time.

Above all, the striking action that takes place in front of the pavilion on the hour has attracted international attention from the very start, becoming the emblem of the project: a naked performer hoists herself inside a bronze bell, sourced from a Venetian church, and transforms herself into a great human clapper, tolling the bell upside down. However, two antique dealers well versed in Flemish and Dutch art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Massimiliano Caretto and Francesco Occhinegro, point out that this is not actually Holzinger’s invention: it appears in several works by Hieronymus Bosch, celebrated for the bizarre, monstrous and extravagant details with which he filled his scenes. In the Triptych of the Last Judgment of 1486, held at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, and in a drawing known as Infernal Landscape, held in a private collection, one can indeed see a performance identical to Holzinger’s but five hundred years earlier. Whether this is an implicit homage that charges the action with further symbolic layers, or simply a coincidence, remains to be seen, as the artist has not yet commented on the matter.

In this context, the Austrian choreographer dedicates her first public opening in Venice through the Études, a series of performances that will be repeated at various moments throughout the Biennale period across the city. Opening the Études, on a crane in the middle of the lagoon, a group of women, naked, dressed only in harnesses, combat boots or waders, await the arrival of the audience. Some of them climb scaffolding, harnessed and hanging from hooks, with amplified electric guitars whose riffs resonate across the lagoon. A conductor, a soprano in her everyday life, already a protagonist in other works by the choreographer, directs the chaos, the sea, the storm with her baton, herself naked save for a collar and a few elements that loosely paraphrase the conventional attire of the orchestral world. A crane lifts a bell from the waters, from which Holzinger emerges, hanging upside down, her blond hair cascading downward. She strikes her hips against the bell’s inner rim from within, making it toll, while South American performer Luz de Luna prepares to suspend herself from hooks pierced into her flesh, and floats with the grace of a dragonfly skimming the water as blood flows gently through the dance of her movements.

The word Études explicitly evokes musical composition and in particular a composition of considerable difficulty, conceived, according to Chopin, to provide practice material for an instrument and its performer. In the world of dance and classical music, from which the artist comes, the term is used in reference to the relationship between bodies, sound and architecture, loosening its ties to action in the sense more familiar to Austrian and Viennese artistic history. Florentina Holzinger parts from this tradition, finding her own reference point in the body, a body disciplined and subjected to its own practice and its own desire for transformation. A body that is never isolated, but shaped through a collaborative relationship with the other forces it summons: other women’s bodies, matter, fluids, and here, waste, in a choice to be together.