Florentina Holzinger Ends Venice Show With a "Final Dinner" Made From Visitor Waste

Florentina Holzinger will close her Venice Biennale work SEAWORLD VENICE with a closing event she calls CLOSING ÉTUDE. ARTnews describes it as "a final dinner" containing all the bodily waste collected from visitors to the pavilion over the past seven months, distilled into a relic.

The Venice Biennale is the city's long-running international art exhibition, and its national pavilions sit in the Giardini gardens. SEAWORLD VENICE opened at the Austrian Pavilion in May. Holzinger, a dance, theatre and performance artist, served as the human clapper of a bell pulled from the Venice Lagoon, the striker that makes a bell ring. She performed nude.

The closing event moves the bell out of the pavilion. According to ARTnews, it will travel in a ceremonial procession from the Austrian Pavilion to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a historic hall in Venice's Cannaregio district. The distilled remains will then be presented in front of the closed Austrian Pavilion on November 22.

The work does not end there. An adapted version is set to open at Gropius Bau, a museum in Berlin, next spring. Kunsthalle Wien, a contemporary art hall in Vienna, will host it that autumn. Amant, a venue in Brooklyn, New York, is scheduled to present it in March 2028. A spokesperson for Amant told ARTnews in June that preparations for the Brooklyn show were already underway.

Nora-Swantje Almes, curator for live programmes and outreach at Gropius Bau, organised the Venice presentation. She will also oversee the Berlin version. Live programmes are the performances, talks and events that a museum stages alongside its displays.

The work has drawn debate from the start. A June review in the Brooklyn Rail, an arts magazine in New York, reported that discussion began right away. Critics, it said, were asking whether the piece marks a turning point in Holzinger's radical feminist work, or is simply a provocation meant to grab attention.

The Venice Biennale's official page for Austria describes Holzinger's long-running research into water, which she uses as both subject and symbol in the piece. The closing event will be the last chance to see SEAWORLD VENICE in its Venice form.