La Jornada: Woman-bell warns in the Austrian Pavilion about the climate crisis

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opened yesterday to the press amid great excitement, both for the return of Russia to the meeting and for the artistic samples presented in the pavilions of the largest contemporary art exhibition in the world, which is held every two years in that city. The Austrian Pavilion stood out for the performance by the Austrian Florentina Holzinger, after hanging naked from a bell and fulfilling the function of the clapper. His intention was to warn about the risk that Venice faces due to an imminent flood and climate change.

The choreographer and performing artist, recognized for her transgressive work, is in charge of representing the Austrian pavilion with a proposal called Seaworld Venice (Sea world Venice), which mixes live performance, scenography and shocking situations to convey a clear idea: to show how power, waste and the climate crisis work.

To represent his country’s pavilion, Holzinger convinced the jury with his innovative proposal, which combines elements of dance, theater and performance with the various questions it raises, “from the management of water as a resource to existential bodily experiences and the social norms that define them.”

In addition to the scene where the artist herself appears naked, hanging upside down and uses her body as if it were the clapper of a giant bell that rings every hour, like a kind of alarm, adding to the project is that the entire pavilion space in the exhibition is set up as if it were a mix between a church, a water theme park and a wastewater treatment plant, which includes a person swimming in a tank full of recycled urine.

According to the project’s website, it is “a metaphor for a global order that leaves the vulnerable as the residue of power,” where “a survivor looks out from the ruins of a civilization dissolved in urine.” The motto is “I live in your piss” (I live in your pee).

With a team of artists, musicians, stunt coordinators and producers, under the curatorship of Nora-Swantje Almes, Florentina Holzinger’s proposal includes symbolic elements; In addition to the bell and the tank, a jet ski appears that circulates within the flooded space, representing the ecological catastrophe linked to mass tourism in Venice and the sinking of the city.

“The work uses the abject to dismantle the polished spectacles of power and progress. The collision between flesh and machinery breaks idealized aesthetic surfaces and forces us to look squarely at social and ecological violence, which is usually softened by institutional discourses. In this framework, the pavilion is presented as a space of radical feminist resistance,” explained the members of the project, which can be visited from Saturday until November 22.