Florentina Holzinger rocks Venice Biennale with nudity, stunts and urine

On a damp Venice morning, art world luminaries climbed onto a boat in the lagoon to witness a one-off performance. Across from them, a barge fitted with a large crane extended its boom above the water, its anchor chain plunging into the turbid depths.

Naked women emerged on the barge, tattooed and booted. Directed by a bandleader in rubber waders, some created an intense wall of sound. An electric guitarist clipped herself to the crane, climbed to a vertiginous height and rocked out while straddling a steel bar. A vocalist screamed like Yoko Ono. After 20 minutes, the boom rose, hoisting a cast-iron bell with a long-haired woman suspended upside down inside. As the bell rose, she slammed her body side to side, sending a ringing across the water.

This is the world of Florentina Holzinger: dancer, artist, choreographer, leader of Europe’s coolest performance girl gang. Representing Austria at the Venice Biennale, she arrives with a reputation. Over the last decade, her performances in European theatres and opera houses have provoked fainting epidemics and tabloid outrage over nudity, blasphemy, sex, body-piercing and human waste.

On stage, Holzinger is otherworldly. At the climax of the opera Sancta earlier this year, she flew high in the air suspended by bolts piercing the skin of her back, slamming her body against a thunderous metal sheet. Sancta has toured European opera houses for two years, opening with a 30-minute performance of Paul Hindemith’s 1921 opera Sancta Susanna. It features a vast climbing wall as backdrop, with performers suspended like spiders, demons and crucified bodies.

Much of Sancta takes the form of an alternative mass dedicated to liberation and acceptance. It includes a close-up magician delivering miracles, a pregnant pope on a robot arm, and nuns performing rollerskate tricks. Holzinger installed a half-pipe on stage to answer how nuns should move. “They are not going to be walking on the floor in a mundane way, but they are, of course, floating, skating,” she said. “Somehow this ramp made sense for us.”

Holzinger was the one hoisted naked from the Venice lagoon, hanging from the bell. In performance, she appears Amazonian: muscular, impervious to cold and pain. In person, she is bright and mischievous, her conversation zipping between research at the Vatican, the late performance artist Valie Export and skate-training in Barcelona. Her slight frame was coddled in thick fleece, as if recharging her core temperature after hours of exposure.

Transforming her work into a performance installation for the biennale required adjustment. Away from the theatre, mishap is constant. “We are always in a ‘brace, brace’ position when it comes to performance,” Holzinger said after Seaworld Venice opened. “We are not naive. We know what the reactions can be. But nothing could have prepared us for this. I wake up in the morning thinking, ‘What will this day bring?'”

Her company performs eight hours a day in all weathers. The audience mills freely around the Austrian pavilion, many unprepared for full nudity as baseline. Venice, Holzinger said, “is really the birthplace of the reclining nude: the horizontal, erotic depiction of women. How can this nudity be deemed so provocative when it comes to real bodies?”

Seaworld Venice is part temple, part gallery, part theme park, part sewage processing plant. Sections of the pavilion hold pools for jetski stunts, contortion acts, and performers suspended from climbing harnesses like a Renaissance altarpiece. In the central courtyard, a performer in a scuba mask stands submerged in a glass tank for four hours. The water around her is the filtered product of two adjacent Portaloos.

During the biennale preview, august art world visitors treated the pavilion like a human zoo. A globally famous museum director, blind to a “No photography” sign, filmed the jetski performance and posted it to Instagram. “It’s really not my style or my ethics to police people,” Holzinger said. “But it’s still outrageous that nobody seems to be able to perceive art without the screen.” Her Instagram account was temporarily suspended after visitors flooded social media with performances.

Holzinger’s performers rotate through roles. One day they do jetski stunts, the next they tend lavatories and instruct visitors on how to use them. “I didn’t realise how important the role of the toilet women would be,” Holzinger said, “but also how people treat the performers – thinking they are ‘just’ toilet women.” She said it speaks volumes about the value afforded different kinds of labour. “Is it more difficult to spend eight hours under the water or be a toilet woman?”

Why install these lavatories? Holzinger recalled her application form for Venice: a whole page about sustainability but only a little space to describe the pavilion’s content. “That made it clear: for us, the content is the sustainability concept.” Few things drive home the environmental relationship between water and waste than facing a woman submerged in filtered urine.

Bodily functions force the highbrow art world to face base practicalities, frequently in the poorly provisioned biennale grounds. “The Austrian pavilion was always the unofficial toilet,” Holzinger grinned. Located at the back of the site, visitors often arrive with full bladders after hours of art. “Everybody pees behind the Austrian pavilion. It always smells like a toilet. And we thought, ‘Why not make a nice, clean, functioning toilet?'”

Holzinger’s work tackles big subjects, including the Catholic church’s control over women’s bodies. Her collaborators come from circus, stunt work, body-piercing and contemporary dance. Their commitment is inscribed on their bodies. A performer who had a small wound-like incision carved in her abdomen during Sancta now has 25 such scars – one for each performance. Another performer, who works with body-piercing, has done “maybe 200 suspensions already in shows of mine,” Holzinger said. “Her back really carries this: she calls it a book.”

Yet the shows are also entertainment, and absurdity is crucial. Sancta featured a stoner Jesus; Seaworld Venice has a slapstick fake sewage system that “engineers” struggle to contain. “Comedy is an essential part of art-making for me,” Holzinger said. “Of course, I want to take on substantial existential questions. But I cannot do it without also trying to laugh it away. There always needs to be a suggestion of hope: a motivation to move forward and actively change things.”

She paused, then added: “At the end of the day, I’m really not an artist who takes themselves so seriously.” She is happy to be hurt, to be ridiculous. But art? That, she takes very seriously indeed.

Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice is in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale until 22 November.