There are still a few days to go before the official opening of the Venice Biennale, scheduled for this May 9, but performances in Venice have already started capturing the public’s attention. Among the most talked-about works circulating in recent hours is certainly the new work by Florentina Holzinger, the artist chosen to represent Austria with the project Seaworld Venice.
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The image is impossible to ignore: Holzinger suspended upside down inside a gigantic bell, swinging back and forth until she rings it with her own body. A scene that feels somewhere between a religious ritual, an extreme stunt, and an apocalyptic warning signal. And that is exactly the point.
The performance is part of a large immersive installation built around the themes of climate catastrophe and rising waters, transforming the Austrian Pavilion into a dystopian vision of a submerged Venice. The figure trapped inside the bell becomes a human warning system, a body ringing out to announce the arrival of the coming flood.
This is not the first time Florentina Holzinger has used the body as a tool for physical and political tension. The Austrian choreographer, performer, and director, born in Vienna in 1986, has become one of the most radical figures in contemporary European performance thanks to works that combine dance, theater, opera, stunts, body art, and extreme practices. Her performances are often marked by nudity, physical endurance, and intentionally disturbing imagery, used not as provocation for its own sake but as a way to address themes related to power, gender, violence, and the vulnerability of the female body.
Over the years, her visual language has built a recognizable imagery suspended between pop culture, body horror, and contemporary rituality. Seaworld Venice also seems to move in this direction: jet skis crossing flooded spaces, performers submerged in water, and scenarios evoking a future dominated by climate collapse. A project that openly recalls the aesthetic of Waterworld, transforming it into a gigantic performative installation.
Even before the official opening of the Biennale, Holzinger’s work has already become one of the most discussed moments of this edition. Not only because of the spectacular nature of the images, but for its ability to transform the body into a collective warning device, something that forces the viewer to confront climate disaster not as a future abstraction, but as a condition that is already here.
