After Venice, Florentina Holzinger Brings a 9-Hour Performance to Vienna
At this year’s Venice Biennale, the performance artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger used the stage of the Austria Pavilion to alert viewers to an increasingly underwater dystopia. Seaworld Venice issued a dire warning of the flood to come: an underwater amusement park and a circling jet-ski signaled ecological catastrophe driven by turbo-tourism, while a group of performers climbed an enormous weathervane as a testament to the strength of collective action, and a performer lived in a reconstructed sewer treatment plant, in a tank sustained by body fluids contributed by the audience. Related Articles It was, certainly, among the most talked about pavilions at this year’s Biennale. On May 23, still sopping from seaworld, Holzinger opened “Pfingstspiel” (Pentecost Play), at Hermann Nitsch’s castle in Prinzendorf an der Zaya near Vienna. The 9-hour, one-time performance—created in collaboration with the Wiener Festwochen arts festival and the Nitsch Foundation—served as a complement to her Venice work. Nitsch, who died in 2022, is often thought of as the father of the 1960s radical performance art movement Viennese Actionism, whose ethos …
