Florentina Holzinger

SEAWORLD VENICE, Florentina Holzinger’s work for the Austrian Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, will have a one-night echo in Bregenz a composition featuring four drummers and ten performers along with a crane and a large-scale bell. For this new iteration of the choreographer’s Études–a series of one-off, site-specific performances unfolding the skills and practices  that go into her stage and installation works–the audience is invited to witness a contemporary ritual on the shore of Lake Constance.

Bodies and objects plunge into the water and emerge transformed, giving shape to a suspended structure that echoes like a wind chime on steroids, accompanied by a drum score. Diving into folktales of often feminized underwater creatures who now share their liquid world with rubbish hidden from an idyllic landscape, the Bodensee Étude re-signifiessin and salvation in a hybrid rite of passage. Performers and equipment come together over, around, and in the body of water at Lake Constance to engineer a situation that becomes part of the artificial nature of the area.

Developed specifically for Kunsthaus Bregenz and the complex ecology of Lake Constance, the Bodensee Étude also brings together key elements of Florentina Holzinger’s repertoire: performative images of a feminism buttressed by technology and desire, machinery and prowess, now orchestrated to conjure new myths out of the silence of the water.

Florentina Holzinger (b. 1986, Vienna) works across artistic disciplines and has produced extensive, widely discussed, awarded-winning theatre. Her most recent stage productions include A Year Without Summer, 2025, her first opera project SANCTA, 2024, Ophelia’s Got Talent, 2022, A Divine Comedy, 2021, Étude for an Emergency, 2020, and her most toured work TANZ, 2019. She has been an associate artist with the Volksbühne Berlin since 2020. With her Étude formats, one-off performances in public spaces, Holzinger has gradually opened her practice to the visual arts context, having presented Études at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin and Bergen Kunsthall amongst others since 2020. In 2026, she will represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale. Florentina Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam.