{"id":1009,"date":"2026-07-21T10:06:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2026-07-21T10:06:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:06:03","slug":"florentina-holzingers-naked-ambition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1009","title":{"rendered":"Florentina Holzinger\u2019s Naked Ambition"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It was the day before the press preview for the Venice Biennale, and the toilets at the Austrian pavilion were broken. In Venice, plumbing problems are routine; the city doesn\u2019t have a modern sewage system, so it relies on its canals and the tides to flush out wastewater treated in thousands of septic tanks. A heavy rain can flood the streets, and private bathrooms. But the two bright-blue porta-potties were not here for convenience. They were part of an installation opening the next day.<\/p>\n

Read more Madonna and the Muppets Made the Case for Love<\/a><\/p>\n

Between the toilets, Florentina Holzinger was naked, in a decent-sized tank of water, maintaining a defiant, full-frontal pose, wearing a diving mask and breathing through a scuba. A steady stream of bubbles was making chunks of her long hair float straight up. Occasionally, her left pinkie twitched. Otherwise, she barely moved. The water contained urine from the porta-potties that had been filtered through a system visible beneath the tank. \u201cIt is maintained by the pee of the people,\u201d Giulia Messia, Holzinger\u2019s publicity manager, explained. \u201cBut no shitting.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Most often referred to as some combination of choreographer, director, and performance artist, Holzinger, who is forty and goes by Flo, usually works in a theatre, though what she makes is not necessarily, or only, theatre. Before she was selected to represent her birth country at the most important event in the art world, she had never done an installation. Two years earlier, she and her stage designer, Nikola Kne\u017eevi\u0107, had visited the Biennale, and when they saw the Austrian pavilion, an austere, geometric building, they thought they could \u201cfor sure do something interesting there,\u201d Holzinger said. At the time, she had just premi\u00e8red a blasphemous stage production, \u201cSANCTA,\u201d described by the Daily Mail<\/em> as \u201ca radical feminist opera which includes explicit lesbian sex scenes, real blood and injuries, and naked roller-skating nuns,\u201d and the pavilion reminded her of a cathedral: nave, transepts, altar. She and her team agreed that a \u201cradical gesture was needed\u201d to justify participating in the art-market \u201ccircus.\u201d They\u2019d fantasized about putting the building in the lagoon and guiding visitors through in scuba gear, but this wasn\u2019t practical.<\/p>\n

Instead, at the pavilion\u2019s entrance, they hung a huge church bell from a crane. Every hour, for eight hours a day, a performer in a rotating cast climbs a rope hanging from the bell, flips herself upside down inside it, and acts as a Boschian clapper, using the force of her body and a heavy metal belt. That\u2019s the cue for most of the other performers\u2014who range in appearance from basically unassuming to covered in tattoos and piercings\u2014to change shifts, in what Holzinger calls a \u201critual.\u201d In addition to the \u201cpiss tank,\u201d the pavilion has four other enclosed spaces, each flooded with water and featuring a different attraction. When I arrived at the rehearsal, these were: a naked woman riding a Jet Ski in circles, going faster and faster until the air smelled of gasoline; naked performers slowly climbing a utility pole, pausing in languid acrobatic poses like live nudes; the artist Hannah Finn, also naked, performing contortion on a raised platform, mirroring two robot dogs splashing around her; and a room lined with machinery, where the water was ominously brown. Nearby, two performers were smoking in white Monobloc chairs, costumed in long aprons and scrubs, rubber gloves close at hand. Other performers dressed as cleaning ladies circulated throughout the space, occasionally running lines: \u201cWe tell people not to shit in the toilets.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The atmosphere was relaxed, though various collaborators assured me, looking haunted, that the technical co\u00f6rdination of this work was more challenging than anything they\u2019d ever done. In the tank, Holzinger\u2019s hands were now pressed against the glass. The dramaturges Sara Ostertag and Michele Rizzo discussed: Was it too much? Yes. Rizzo began roaming around and dropped an open notebook that he\u2019d been using in front of me. I could make out typical production notes, in both English and German; a doodle of Holzinger\u2019s current pose, with starfish hands and exaggerated goggles; and the phrase \u201cslapstick in shitstorm.\u201d<\/p>\n

A scripted plumbing issue was unfolding alongside the actual one. As\u00a0a producer\u00a0hunched beneath the tank to show a service technician the filtration system over video call, a cleaning lady entered the room with machinery. Brown water suddenly spewed from the equipment, shooting into her mouth and eyes. Hoses in the water flailed. The performer yelled, splashed, and fell, trying futilely to fix it. Holzinger and her technicians had arrived in Venice only three weeks before; since then, the cleaning ladies had taken on a much bigger role than planned. Now that the show, \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE,\u201d has opened\u2014to long lines and a deluge of press that have made it, without question, the most discussed work at the Biennale\u2014visitors often assume that they are actual janitorial staff, and treat them accordingly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the tank, Holzinger crossed her arms. Since the Biennale began, in May, performers have remained in the tank for four- or eight-hour shifts; sometimes they face visitors directly, or they may be eating, sitting, or sleeping, with a blanket and pillow. What each performer does is up to her, but Holzinger enjoys the break from the outside world. For years, she has been a star of the European experimental-theatre scene; in 2021, she became an artist-in-residence at Berlin\u2019s Volksb\u00fchne, where her productions sell out within minutes. But a durational exhibition requires a totally different allocation of time and energy, and the frenzied interests of private donors can be draining. \u201cI can have amazing naps in there, in the water,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After an hour, the bell rang, and Holzinger handed off the scuba and emerged from the water. Her face lined from the goggles, she put on a huge tie-dyed sweatshirt, baggy shorts, and reflective Oakley sunglasses. She then immediately removed the shorts and began going over notes with Rizzo and Ostertag. The hands were too much, yeah. The crossed arms were O.K., except that she looked cold. She hadn\u2019t had a problem with the temperature, but performers would stay in the tank for longer, so they should warm it up. It was then that Ostertag explained what was happening with the porta-potties\u2014the pressure levels kept changing, which is why they couldn\u2019t flush the toilets earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you kidding me?\u201d Holzinger replied, calmly. She put her shorts back on and asked how the shitstorm had gone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine Holzinger freaking out about anything, except maybe slowing down. While \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE\u201d is on view, through November, she is also touring three ensemble productions and organizing several one-off performances, which she calls \u201c\u00c9tudes.\u201d The last time we spoke, on a video call from her apartment in Venice, she described the Biennale piece as \u201cminimal.\u201d \u201cIt gets depicted as this shocking, radical thing, but if you come from experimental theatre there is nothing shocking or radical about it,\u201d she said. \u201cActually, my biggest complex was that it\u2019s so gentle. You know, not much happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was being serious. A typical Holzinger show lasts for around three hours and begins with a premise that is abandoned when it no longer suits her \u201cschizophrenic\u201d pace. In \u201cTANZ\u201d (2019), it\u2019s a ballet class; in \u201cOphelia\u2019s Got Talent\u201d (2022), a talent show; in \u201cSANCTA\u201d (2024), the one-act Paul Hindemith opera \u201cSancta Susanna,\u201d in which the title character has heretical visions of lesbian sex that Holzinger represents live, followed by a \u201cMass.\u201d Her most recent stage work, \u201cA Year Without Summer\u201d (2025), reimagines the summer of 1816, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia blocked out the sun and, among other consequences, led to Mary Shelley writing \u201cFrankenstein.\u201d (The show is a musical.) The productions may feature aerial pole dancing, live tattooing, hook suspension, hair hanging, wood chopping, the heavily sound-effected masturbation of ceramic penises, hypnosis, blood, and flesh eating (a very small piece of skin). Performers change roles throughout, and during onstage interludes they narrate autobiographical confessions, near-death experiences, and sexual assaults. Almost everyone is naked, including opera singers, musicians, old women, disabled women, camerawomen, and women with no formal dance training.<\/p>\n

Like all interdisciplinary artists, Holzinger is constrained by the language of category. She is often linked to the Viennese Actionists, of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and to performance artists like Marina Abramovi\u0107, but figures from theatre and dance are more helpful in answering the question \u201cBut what is it?\u201d Formally, her closest predecessors are probably post-Wall, post-dramatic German directors like Christoph Schlingensief and Ren\u00e9 Pollesch, whose political, self-referential work pushed beyond traditional literary elements like plot, dialogue, and character to examine the relationship between performer and audience. (Theatre for people who hate plays.) Much of the action in Holzinger\u2019s work, especially the body horror, is projected live onto large screens on either side of the stage\u2014common in European theatre, but used here to show what is otherwise hidden, often some kind of upsetting process. (In \u201cOphelia,\u201d the professional sword-swallower Fibi Eyewalker seems to swallow a fish, followed by an endoscopic camera.) The result is not just a spectacle but something that produces the satisfaction of narrative, as the songs, dances, scenes, and feats of daring accrue: a Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em> that knows and resists the term. \u201cShe\u2019s always kind of saying \u2018Fuck you\u2019 to Wagner,\u201d Brandon Woolf, a professor of dramatic literature at New York University, told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Though Holzinger views each of her pieces as research for the next, and though there is no skill or concept in \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE\u201d that she hasn\u2019t worked on in some way before, it makes sense that the installation is what has brought her widespread attention. It\u2019s her most accessible work, not only because it\u2019s fairly easy to say what it\u2019s about (\u201cHow we live in crisis,\u201d as Holzinger offered at a press event) but also because it doesn\u2019t really<\/em> challenge the viewer\u2019s gag reflex, endurance, or sense of good taste. The first time a porta-potty appeared in a Holzinger piece, for example, it was a gateway to Hell, chasing a pantsless Dante in \u201cA Divine Comedy\u201d (2021). Later in that show, four women shit simultaneously, downstage, directly in front of the audience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Given Holzinger\u2019s notoriety, and her own ironic relationship to extremes, her use of trigger warnings, posted before every performance, may seem beside the point, or even hypocritical. \u201cI don\u2019t want to traumatize people forever,\u201d she told me, messing with her dirty-blond hair, putting it up and taking it down again with the controlled power of a butcher preparing cuts of meat. Still, people sometimes pass out, or have to leave, during her shows. The Vienna run of \u201cSANCTA\u201d was particularly chaotic; during one performance, even the show\u2019s first violinist fainted, breaking both his nose and his instrument, after accidentally glimpsing a scene in which someone sticks a finger into an open wound. \u201cIt was like a field hospital!\u201d Holzinger said. \u201cPeople were being very dramatic.\u201d She did a squeaky voice: \u201c\u00a0\u2018Ah! My husband is not moving anymore! Help!\u2019\u00a0\u201d The glee, or Schadenfreude, in her retelling comes from her uneasy relationship with Austria and its sometimes \u201cgrumpy\u201d press\u2014you\u2019d expect such a response in the provinces, not in supposedly sophisticated Vienna. It\u2019s \u201calmost like a joke\u201d that she\u2019s representing the country in the Biennale, she told me, adding that she \u201creally needed to leave this country in order to finally do what I wanted to do, to express myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Feminism-wise, Holzinger uses the obviousness of nudity to make fairly nuanced interventions. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of a tampon string, just as you might see the complicated rigging of a set; the effect is to emphasize what the female body can be and do. The scholar Caroline Lillian Schopp has described Holzinger\u2019s mode as \u201cfeminist decadence\u201d that \u201cluxuriates in the violence that so-called high art and its histories conceal.\u201d In other words, Holzinger is funny. In \u201cOphelia,\u201d she perverts \u201cApocalypse Now,\u201d among other works, by having five women\u2014herself included\u2014literally have sex with a helicopter, which is suspended from the ceiling and piloted by Saioa Alvarez, a little person who, elsewhere in the Holzinger universe, gives a furious sermon as \u201cthe first lesbian Pope.\u201d The performers grind and moan as rain pours from above and a wind machine roars. Eventually, the helicopter ejaculates a waterfall from its door, and the storm subsides.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the helicopter represents a fundamental pragmatism in Holzinger\u2019s work. She feels a responsibility to do something with the resources she has; more than pushing the boundaries of feminist performance art, she pushes the boundaries of logistical and technical co\u00f6rdination. \u201cWhen we came into the Volksb\u00fchne for the first time, we saw this high fly space that you don\u2019t actually see from the perspective of the audience, but that\u2019s fucking unique about this theatre,\u201d she told me. \u201cA helicopter could fly into the building. I mean, we feel an obligation to use this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blatant ambition comes with its own drama; Holzinger\u2019s work can feel rough around the edges, creating the sense that, at any level of a production, something might go very wrong. \u201cViewers should doubt whether we really have everything under control,\u201d Holzinger has said. In addition to the helicopter, \u201cOphelia\u201d involves a pool and two dunk tanks. Water \u201calways finds a way to mess with the infrastructure,\u201d Kne\u017eevi\u0107, Holzinger\u2019s stage designer, told me. When they met, he had never done professional theatre before\u2014he trained as an architect\u2014but Holzinger asked a question that excited him: Could he make her a ballet barre that would hold weight but also, eventually, break?<\/p>\n

Holzinger was born in Vienna, and her parents, a lawyer and a pharmacist who dislikes the sight of blood, are normal. When she was ten years old, she developed anorexia and drank so much water, trying to weigh herself down for doctors\u2019 appointments, that she gave herself water poisoning. She spent nearly a year in a rehabilitation center, living with \u201ctroubled kids\u201d whom she found \u201cmuch more interesting,\u201d she told me, than her \u201cevil group of friends\u201d from a conservative public school. When she was seventeen, she took a contemporary-dance class, and loved it. Because her parents didn\u2019t want her to pursue the profession\u2014and because she wanted state funding\u2014she took a year of architecture and business courses while training and auditioning for dance schools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Journalists often claim that Holzinger wanted to be a ballerina but started too late, and with the wrong body, to do so. It\u2019s a compelling narrative: it allows a writer to imply, in an ostensibly feminist maneuver, that Holzinger is kind of short and has the body of someone who could play an M.M.A. fighter in a film, which she has also done. Actually, she\u2019d wanted to be \u201ca really good contemporary dancer,\u201d she told me, but was \u201cvery unsuccessful.\u201d (She is \u201creally not good\u201d at remembering choreography.) Eventually, she was accepted into the School for New Dance Development (S.N.D.O.), in Amsterdam, but she never wanted to make her own work. \u201cI wanted to just learn how to move and be a part of a group,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

At S.N.D.O., she met Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer and director who was a year below her. They were both adventurous, rebellious, and interested in challenging ideas about what a man and a woman could do onstage; they were also both, Riebeek told me, kicked out of school for periods of time. \u201cShe was super enigmatic,\u201d he said. \u201cShe would do everything a little bit different. Even watching her make a sandwich could be super fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n

They quickly became inseparable.\u00a0They didn\u2019t really plan or rehearse; they just spent all their time together, making work \u201cfor each other and not for somebody else,\u201d Holzinger said. Only later, when they were introduced to production houses, did they realize that other people practiced. An adapted version of a school project, \u201cKein Applaus f\u00fcr Scheisse\u201d (2010), became a hit on the European avant-garde-theatre circuit; several other works\u2014sexual, aggressive\u2014followed. For years, they travelled and lived together, developing a reputation as enfants terribles. \u201cWe were lucky,\u201d Holzinger said of their early success, because it meant that they \u201cnever had to hustle for a job.\u201d Onstage, Riebeek was the campy, effortful foil to Holzinger\u2019s relentless cool; watching her today, you can see how she would have been stoic even when her partner was vomiting on her, or slowly pulling a long string out of her vagina with his teeth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Over time, though, what they called their \u201ccodependent\u201d relationship became, in Holzinger\u2019s words, \u201ctorturous.\u201d Riebeek was frustrated to be pigeonholed as \u201cqueer\u201d\u2014\u201cI\u2019m licking pussy onstage,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that\u2019s queer, apparently, when I do it\u201d\u2014but Holzinger felt the label was important to the work. They were increasingly at odds about credit and vision. \u201cMaybe we were a bit doomed from the start because we were obsessed with Marina and Ulay,\u201d Riebeek said, laughing, referring to Abramovi\u0107 and her longtime companion and collaborator, Frank Uwe (Ulay) Laysiepen. There\u2019s a scene in \u201cKein Applaus\u201d that\u2019s inspired by Abramovi\u0107 and Ulay\u2019s first work together, \u201cRelation in Space\u201d (1976), in which Holzinger and Riebeek hurl themselves at each other. But \u201cRelation in Space\u201d attempts to create a unity called \u201cThat Self\u201d from male and female energy. In \u201cKein Applaus,\u201d Holzinger and Riebeek appear to be interrupting each other, hurting each other, as they try to perform something for themselves. \u201cWe always knew it was going to end,\u201d Riebeek said, \u201cbut it seemed unimaginable at the time.\u201d Maybe, Holzinger proposed, it was just a \u201ctypical fag-hag relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, in 2017, Riebeek needed knee surgery, and they had to take a break. \u201cAll of a sudden,\u201d Holzinger told me, \u201cwe just never saw each other again.\u201d After that, she stopped working with men onstage, beginning with her first large ensemble piece, \u201cApollon\u201d (2017). \u201cI haven\u2019t followed his work recently, but he used to be a great artist,\u201d she said. \u201cI think that\u2019s not something you really lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more I Give My Kid the Talk<\/a><\/p>\n

In the spring of 2024, I attended several \u201cSANCTA\u201d rehearsals at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, in the German city of Schwerin, where it premi\u00e8red, hoping to understand how a Holzinger production comes together. I concluded that it happens mostly through doing it. There was a little box of sushi from an Asian grocery store\u2014Holzinger has no special diet\u2014and a very large binder. After an idea for a new piece congeals, a core group travels for research. For \u201cSANCTA,\u201d they went to Rome, and to Barcelona, where roller-skating on a half-pipe could be practiced in nice weather. Meanwhile, Holzinger was going to the opera, which she initially didn\u2019t like, and to Mass, which she grew up attending. Once the whole team assembles, professors and other experts visit rehearsals, offering insights on the production\u2019s themes; for \u201cSANCTA,\u201d Felix Ritter, a former teacher of Holzinger\u2019s and a dramaturge who also worked on \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE,\u201d led them in Bible study. \u201cShe never goes blind into a fight,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In the theatre, Holzinger\u2019s instructions were direct, never agitated or hostile, spoken into a microphone from the front row. She periodically took notes, which she would later go over with the cast. She watched in different postures: with one or both legs stretched out on the wall that divided the orchestra pit from the front row; with both legs dangling into the pit; with her butt balanced on a closed theatre seat. During one dress rehearsal, when her cue to go onstage arrived, she took off all her clothes, put on a metal belt, and left her spot. Soon, a rope hanging from a giant church bell above center stage went taut, and Holzinger appeared, climbing up from a trapdoor to call the theatre to \u201cMass.\u201d Then she returned to her spot, put her pants back on, and remained topless as she watched the rest of the run, which went on for nearly two more hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Holzinger emphasizes that her work is not a \u201ccommunity project\u201d\u2014it\u2019s not that kind of feminism, and if you don\u2019t want to be naked onstage you probably can\u2019t join this group. She enjoys the responsibility, and everyone respects that it\u2019s ultimately her show. During one \u201cSANCTA\u201d rehearsal, I watched the cast perform \u201cBlow, Gabriel, Blow,\u201d by Cole Porter, a number in which the opera singer Emma Rothmann is raised in a harness over the rest of the performers as they dance. Initially, this was supposed to happen for about thirty seconds, in the middle of the song, but the transition didn\u2019t work. Rothmann looked nervous as she tried to strap herself into the harness while smiling and belting the lyrics. Holzinger interrupted the run-through: Rothmann needed to sing the entire song in the air.<\/p>\n

Concern fell across the face of Sophie Duncan, a choreographer and an aerialist. \u201cBut that means she\u2019s gonna hang in the sky for three and a half minutes,\u201d she said. Later, Rothmann and Duncan told me that Rothmann had never been in the stage harness before that rehearsal, which was a little more than two weeks before the premi\u00e8re. Duncan, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil, also noted that no one looks good just dangling for that long.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut she can do it,\u201d Holzinger replied. She was right. Later, she told Rothmann to perform it \u201cmore like a Nazi,\u201d which was also right.<\/p>\n

Still, Holzinger\u2019s process is inherently collaborative, and the team appreciates the platform that she gives them. Annina Machaz, an actress who often plays the role of deranged m.c.\u2014in \u201cSANCTA,\u201d she\u2019s a douchebag Jesus, vaping and ranting\u2014has been working with Holzinger since they met at a dance festival, a decade ago; she writes her own lines. \u201cShe really gives me carte blanche,\u201d Machaz told me. Duncan joined the team for \u201cOphelia,\u201d in 2022, after she saw a casting call on a circus forum; she became the unofficial harness adviser after noticing the lackadaisical way the group had been using them. Earlier in her career, Holzinger found performers by posting a Craigslist ad seeking \u201cwomen with special talents.\u201d Many of her performers stick around, or return, teaching others and learning from them. The motorcyclist and stunt rider Keity Meier, who appeared in \u201cDivine Comedy,\u201d riding laps around the stage with a skeleton on her back, is performing in Venice, and not only on the Jet Ski.<\/p>\n

Holzinger is also open to networking, if you\u2019re really interesting. Ruby-Kale Roberts, who performs under the name Fleshpiece and works with ceramics, hook suspension, and a host of other things, got Holzinger\u2019s number through some performers in \u201cOphelia.\u201d She\u2019d heard that \u201cSANCTA\u201d would involve skating. \u201cI sent a sassy text message that said, Hey, I have a beard and a cunt, and I love being naked. By the way, I also skate,\u201d Roberts said, laughing. Holzinger replied that her cast was full, but two weeks later\u2014late in the production process\u2014she wrote back asking for Roberts\u2019s availability. She became a huge part of the show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s appropriate, Ritter told me, leaning over the back of his chair during a \u201cSANCTA\u201d rehearsal one afternoon, that Holzinger was doing a show about nuns. She and her group are kind of like a convent: \u201csisters,\u201d childless, dedicated to a higher power. \u201cThis is our church,\u201d Roberts, channelling an evil evangelical preacher, bellows in the final sequence of the show, \u201cand we will nail you to the present moment like Jesus was nailed to the Cross.\u201d Then she squats, her vagina directed toward the audience, and issues a semi-improvised, sexually explicit monologue as the entire cast sings \u201cDon\u2019t Dream It,\u201d from \u201cThe Rocky Horror Picture Show.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of Holzinger\u2019s work, even the early pieces, made during what she calls her \u201ctrashy days,\u201d exhibits a poignant belief in what is possible, not just for an individual body or an intrepid audience but for the collective. Without an extreme perspective, this message would be sentimental, and she has refined it as she\u2019s matured. In 2013, during a show with Riebeek, a screw holding her weight during an aerial stunt came loose, and she fell sixteen feet. \u201cI saw her whole body snap over her neck, and I was sure I was going to have to take care of my friend for the rest of my life,\u201d Riebeek told me. \u201cI felt like, Now it\u2019s over.\u201d At the hospital, doctors resisted giving Holzinger an X-ray; in the show that she and Riebeek had been performing, Holzinger was \u201cpregnant,\u201d which the doctors assumed to be true. \u201cWe had to fight for her to get proper medical care,\u201d Riebeek said. \u201cLike, \u2018It\u2019s theatre! It\u2019s fiction! I didn\u2019t really make her pregnant!\u2019\u00a0\u201d When the doctors finally scanned her, she had only a concussion, a broken nose, and a missing tooth.<\/p>\n

Since then, she has professionalized and become fastidious about safety protocols, but she continues to \u201cplay with risk and the unforeseen and the possibility of failure,\u201d as she puts it. Scenes of care, and of redemption, often ensue. In \u201cOphelia,\u201d the artist Netti N\u00fcganen performs a Houdini act underwater, with her limbs and her neck chained inside a dunk tank. After more than two minutes, she begins to flail, pulling frantically at her collar. Holzinger jumps into the tank, her movements inelegant and panicked, and pulls N\u00fcganen out. The stage, now covered in water, is quickly cleared as Holzinger comforts N\u00fcganen; the fake-out isn\u2019t entirely apparent until Saioa Alvarez comes out dressed as a plumber to take a look. Then N\u00fcganen, who until recently had been holding her breath for nearly three minutes, begins to tap-dance.<\/p>\n

Holzinger appears in her shows less than she used to, but she tries to\u00a0experience most of what she asks her collaborators to do, and she obviously loves performing. (She first learned hook suspension for \u201cSANCTA,\u201d as \u201ca treat to myself.\u201d) Given that she casts women of all ages\u2014the legendary dancer and actress Beatrice (Trixie) Cordua performed with her until she died, at eighty-two, last year\u2014there is no reason to think she will stop, but the question of how to age with dignity and artistic integrity seems to be bothering her. She developed another little \u201ccomplex\u201d about \u201cA Year Without Summer,\u201d which required a much slower pace than comes naturally to her. No one else would consider the show calm, of course. It begins with a huge, multigenerational orgy that lasts for twenty minutes, becoming increasingly absurd before morphing into a musical loosely organized around the history of science and medicine and its careless approach to women. (Briefly, Machaz plays a douchebag Freud, skipping through a pile of cocaine and screaming about vagina dentata; Alvarez plays Josef Mengele.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The production ends with an extended hospital scene that parallels the orgy. What starts as a tender image of elder care, with younger performers slowly helping older women into robes and beds, transforms. One embarrassing \u201caccident\u201d follows another until, by the end, everyone is screaming, crying, throwing up, shitting, and panicking. Toilets appear, hopelessly. There is no effort to hide the tubes and apparatuses from which fake bodily fluids gush. It is relentless, hilarious, tiresome, and disgusting. It is also brave\u2014not because everyone is, as always, more or less naked but because it is over the top and ugly about what, in life, is the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Finally, the drama lets up. Small groups form; sex returns, softly. A selfie stick circulates, and the results are projected onto screens flanking the stage. It is sweet, and sickening, the impulse to take pictures at the end of the world. Then Bl\u00e1thin Eckhardt, a guitarist and a dancer, climbs a platform at the back of the stage and begins, incredibly, to ice-skate. On the screens, a message appears. It\u2019s a succinct statement about the duty of the individual, the artist, to others within a haywire system: \u201cNO END.\u201d Eckhardt continues skating in exquisite, small loops, showing her exhaustion at times, through the curtain call. The mess below remains, but it\u2019s no longer ugly. She doesn\u2019t stop skating until every single audience member has left.<\/p>\n

On the second day of the Venice preview, it was raining, and a group of curators, journalists, and V.I.P.s met at 9 A.M.<\/em> to take two chartered boats to an \u201c\u00c9tude\u201d that would be performed in the middle of the lagoon. While waiting to board, Kne\u017eevi\u0107 told me that the crew had been at the pavilion until eleven the night before; one of the robot dogs had stopped working, and they\u2019d had to reconfigure the room, installing a dartboard so that Finn, the contortionist, could do archery (with her feet). Still, he and Holzinger seemed in good spirits. \u201cIt fits the concept somehow, that it is about failing systems,\u201d Holzinger said of the malfunction. Ultimately, she added, the only thing that really needed to work was the toilets.<\/p>\n

On the boat to the performance, Holzinger and the pavilion\u2019s curator, Nora-Swantje Almes, held a brief discussion about the work. Holzinger isn\u2019t very good at speeches\u2014her perpetual state is that she\u2019s either about to perform or has just performed\u2014but she was charming, cheekily vulgar, and intelligent. \u201cThis is really not theatre,\u201d she said, mischievously. \u201cThis is really not a spectacle.\u201d She concluded by exclaiming \u201cI have to stretch!\u201d and decamped to a partitioned area of the boat.<\/p>\n

Nearly two miles offshore, we approached a barge carrying a crane. We disembarked onto another barge and sat on a set of bleachers. On the stage barge, seven naked performers climbed on the crane, and a noise band assembled at the bow. Machaz followed the musician Gibrana Cervantes with an umbrella to protect Cervantes\u2019s violin. The mezzo-soprano Andrea Baker, nude but for a wing-tip collar and rubber hip waders, took the position of conductor.<\/p>\n

They played ambient drone for a while, menacing, anticipatory. Baker was going to summon something from the depths. Lane Shi, a musician and an artist who uses vocal techniques from Mongolian throat singing, issued high-pitched squeals like a creature. Then Eckhardt, with her electric guitar, began to ascend the crane, pausing to perform rock-star maneuvers. Shi followed her halfway. In position, she sang, and then screamed, conjuring sounds from the sea, mountains, and dirty basement gigs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Finally, the music reached a crescendo as the crane started to pull something from the water. A bell appeared, and then, inside, Holzinger herself, upside down, her long hair hanging like seaweed. Underwater, a rope had been tracked from the boat to the bell so that she could find her way\u2014the lagoon is basically opaque\u2014but she said that the most stressful part was communicating the timing to the Italian crane operator. She had been going into the water with industrial divers for months, as research. It gives you a rash.<\/p>\n

The music stopped. Eckhardt and Shi climbed down from the crane; when they disembarked, Eckhardt took Shi\u2019s head in her arms and hugged her tightly, for several seconds. Everyone watched in silence, in the rain, as Holzinger tolled the bell.<\/p>\n

Kne\u017eevi\u0107 told me that, while visiting the Sistine Chapel for \u201cSANCTA\u201d research, the team noticed how Michelangelo had painted women to look like men: something about them being upside down. In the bell, Holzinger\u2019s previously compact torso becomes long and androgynous, her arms and lats titanic. But it\u2019s in her neck, the way she controls her head to follow the violent motion of the rest of her body, the force of which seems to come from somewhere beyond herself, that you get the rare chance to see it: she\u2019s a very good contemporary dancer.<\/p>\n

The crane moved Holzinger closer to a boat that was stationed next to the barge. Luna Duran, whose brown hair hangs almost to her knees, waited there, with hooks installed in the flesh on her thin shoulder blades. Holzinger picked her up by a cable attached to the hooks. As the pair were lifted back above the water, still hanging from the bell, the band started thrashing and screaming for the climax. With Holzinger in control of the cable holding her, Duran twisted and swung, sometimes like a nymph, sometimes like a caught fish, bleeding from the wounds in her back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Eventually, they were lowered back onto the boat. They had rehearsed this only once, for \u201cabout ten minutes,\u201d Holzinger said, owing to the cold, boat-traffic regulations, and the expense. \u201cWith these \u2018\u00c9tudes,\u2019 it\u2019s always fucking kamikaze and last-minute everything,\u201d she added, but \u201cthey always work out.\u201d As she dropped back onto her feet, she was beaming and, seeming to forget the audience, gave Duran a high five.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more David Rothenberg Arrives at the Punch Line<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Oyler profiles the artist behind \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE,\u201d at the Venice Biennale, along with \u201cSANCTA\u201d and \u201cA Year Without Summer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-onward-and-upward-with-the-arts"],"yoast_head":"\nFlorentina Holzinger\u2019s Naked Ambition - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1009\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Florentina Holzinger\u2019s Naked Ambition - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lauren Oyler profiles the artist behind \u201cSEAWORLD VENICE,\u201d at the Venice Biennale, along with \u201cSANCTA\u201d and \u201cA Year Without Summer.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1009\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-21T10:06:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"28 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Florentina Holzinger\u2019s Naked Ambition\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-21T10:06:03+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009\"},\"wordCount\":5551,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/6557e31edb9093ddae983133b673e12a.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Onward and Upward with the Arts\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1009\",\"name\":\"Florentina Holzinger\u2019s Naked Ambition - 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