In piano parlance, an étude is a technically tricky piece of music typically practiced to push a musician beyond their limits. Following that logic, the name of Florentina Holzinger’s final Venice Biennale performance, CLOSING ÉTUDE, suggests that after seven months of her propriety-imploding, waste-wonderland SEAWORLD VENICE, there are feats of endurance still ahead.
Part performance, part installation, SEAWORLD VENICE opened at the Austrian Pavilion in May with the piercing peal of a colossal bell salvaged from the Venice Lagoon. In line with her body-first philosophy, a nude Holzinger served as its human clapper. The bell, sans artist, continues to mark the passage of time, ringing every hour over the pavilion and its guests, a grotesque altar to the ongoing Venetian apocalypse. Human refuse (freshly sourced) and lagoon waste, the sort that occasionally washes in with the high tide, form the material of her installation. Visitors were encouraged to use port-a-potties on site; the urine was filtered into a dunk tank.
For CLOSING ÉTUDE, the bell will travel in a ceremonial procession from the pavilion to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a historic building in Venice’s Cannaregio district. Founded in the Middle Ages as a guild, the building reopened as an exhibition space in 2015 after an architectural restoration. A soaring ceiling, a cavernous belly, and frescoes (attributed to the school of Paolo Veronese) suit the bell and the sacred tone she’s struck. Conjuring shades of Christ, CLOSING ÉTUDE is “a final dinner.”
According to the announcement, “This last Venice Étude traces a material transformation from solid to liquid, forging a relic. Containing all the bodily waste collected from pavilion visitors over the past seven months, the distilled remains serve as a monument for the future, which will be presented in front of the closed pavilion on November 22.” The show ends when the bell “falls silent” and water “stops circulating.”
The show is born anew, soon enough. An adapted version of SEAWORLD VENICE will be presented at Gropius Bau in Berlin next spring, followed by a stop at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna that fall, before its last leg in March 2028 at Amant in Brooklyn.
Nora-Swantje Almes, curator for live programs and outreach at Gropius Bau, who organized the Venice presentation, will oversee this new iteration. A spokesperson for Amant confirmed to ARTnews in June that preparations were already underway, but declined to confirm whether the jet skis and porta-potties from Venice will make the trip. “If you saw the show in Venice, you know it’s very site-responsive, so [Almes] needs to figure out how to adapt it for Berlin after the Biennale closes in Venice this fall,” the spokesperson said. “After that, we’ll have a better idea of how our own team can further adapt it for Brooklyn.”