Florentina Holzinger Ends 'Seaworld Venice' With a 'Final Dinner' of Distilled Waste

Florentina Holzinger will close her Venice Biennale pavilion show on November 22 with CLOSING ÉTUDE, a "final dinner" built from seven months of visitors' bodily waste. The Austrian artist's SEAWORLD VENICE, part performance and part installation, has run at the Austrian Pavilion since May.

The closing work's name carries its own logic. In piano parlance, an étude is a technically tricky piece practiced to push a musician past their limits. After seven months of what the announcement calls her propriety-imploding waste wonderland, the title suggests feats of endurance still lie ahead.

What has SEAWORLD VENICE actually been?

The show opened in May with the peal of a colossal bell salvaged from the Venice Lagoon. True to Holzinger's body-first philosophy, a nude Holzinger served as the bell's human clapper. The bell, now without the artist, still rings every hour over the pavilion — the announcement frames it as a grotesque altar to the ongoing Venetian apocalypse.

The installation's material is waste itself. Freshly sourced human refuse and lagoon waste, the kind that washes in with the high tide, form its substance. Visitors used port-a-potties on site, and the urine was filtered into a dunk tank.

What happens on November 22?

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. Its soaring ceiling, cavernous belly and frescoes — attributed to the school of Paolo Veronese — suit the bell and the sacred tone Holzinger has struck. Conjuring shades of Christ, the artist calls the closing performance "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 the water "stops circulating."

Where does the show go after Venice?

SEAWORLD VENICE isn't finished — it's being reborn on a tour. An adapted version opens at Gropius Bau in Berlin next spring, followed by Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna that fall. Its final leg opens in March 2028 at Amant in Brooklyn.

Nora-Swantje Almes, curator for live programs and outreach at Gropius Bau, organized the Venice presentation and will oversee the new iteration. An Amant spokesperson confirmed to ARTnews in June that preparations were already underway, but declined to say whether the jet skis and port-a-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."

So what does this change for audiences who missed Venice? Quite a lot: the work survives, but each city gets its own mutation — and the relic distilled from seven months of Biennale visitors stays behind in Venice as the show's permanent monument.