- Title:
- SEAWORLD VENICE, Florentina Holzinger
- Author:
- Dina Jezdić
- Date:
- 24.09.26
No One Belongs Here More Than You1
Venice is often experienced as a city floating effortlessly on water. In reality, this architectural miracle is anchored by a largely invisible forest of timber piles driven deep into the lagoon’s sediment centuries ago. Those foundations have sustained the city for generations, but Venice now faces a different challenge. Global desire and tourism keep it economically alive, while simultaneously accelerating the physical and ecological pressures that threaten its long-term survival.
The Venice Art Biennale shares something of the city’s architecture: a fascination with surfaces sustained by foundations that remain largely out of sight. What once functioned as a laboratory for artistic experimentation and geopolitical reflection now increasingly performs as a curated spectacle for global consumption. Before a single pavilion is installed, a hierarchy is already well in place: pre-previews, previews, VIP access, collector dinners, celebrity sightings and invitation only events. The system manufactures scarcity and exclusivity, producing the illusion that just beyond the next security cordon or accreditation badge something extraordinary is happening. Like most myths, it survives because of our shared desire to be in the room on the other side of the velvet rope. For some, years are spent trying to reach the centre of the art world, only to discover that the centre is largely a story constructed to feed the very machine that sustains these illusions.
On the first morning of the press previews I ignored everything else and went straight to the Austrian Pavilion. The queue was already immense, snaking through the Giardini under a sky that was about to collapse. Within minutes of heavy rainfall, everyone looked bedraggled. Luxury raincoats, designer sunglasses, carefully considered outfits and expensive shoes all dissolved into the same sodden uniform under the relentless deluge. We stood there for more than an hour, water pooling around our feet, while discarded coffee cups, crushed cans, programmes and wet packaging spilled from the bins. The scene felt like the exhausted aftermath of a large outdoor festival, noticeably overflowing with the rubbish we had all consumed a very short time ago.
From the queue, I caught fragmented glimpses of a massive bell being physically activated by a nude performer suspended upside down, her body swinging from side to side as she worked the mechanism. Each strike echoed the sounds of the church and alarm.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
When I finally entered the pavilion, my pulse raced before my mind caught up. The atmosphere was electric. Somewhere inside my brain, dopamine surged. We had all sacrificed time, comfort and dignity and finally, we were here to witness our reward.
A vertical scaffold with climbing bodies rose through the space like an improvised tower. It held my attention completely. There was a rare suspension of mental noise, all competing thoughts disappeared and my consciousness narrowed into focus, perfect stillness. Florentina Holzinger’s SEAWORLD VENICE (2026) unfolded as a flooded amusement park, sewage treatment plant, church and ecological fever dream. Watching a jet ski circle endlessly through the waterlogged pavilion, I felt suspended, wanting it to last forever. The work was unexpectedly thrilling. Yet beneath the exhilaration lies a devastating observation about the environmental cost of endless consumption and mass tourism.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
Holzinger’s work also exposed the enduring Western obsession with the female nude, a figure at once sexualised and made vulnerable through the act of looking. The bodies that perform in Holzinger’s work are not offered up for passive consumption. They are physically aggressive, technically accomplished and completely in command of the conditions under which they are seen. They bleed, strain, risk injury and demonstrate endurance. Their bodies cease to function as objects and become material instead.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
I thought I had come to experience a performance. Instead, I found that spectatorship was the artwork’s primary medium.
The workers, the activators, the architecture, the choreography of access, the queue itself—all of it depended upon people like me. We were the spectacle. We were the bodies being organised, directed and observed. The performers scrutinised us as much as we scrutinised them. We became exposed and implicated. The gaze circulated through the room, while the distinction between stage and audience collapsed. A cultural event dependent on international tourism stages a critique of consumption and extraction; an audience seeking spectacle finds itself inside the spectacle it came to see.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
The realisation reminded me of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Two Undiscovered Amerindians Discover the West (1992–94), often referred to as The Couple in the Cage. In the work, Fusco and Gómez-Peña presented themselves as members of a fictional Indigenous tribe and were exhibited across public institutions in a museum-style cage, performing banal, almost intimate gestures: watching television, exercising, sewing and drinking tea. Framed as a “newly discovered” Indigenous couple from an unknown island, they were inserted directly into the ethnographic display. They were curiosities.
What the work so precisely stages is a reversal of the ethnographic gaze. The performers are fully conscious artists inhabiting and exaggerating the frame. In doing so, the audience becomes the location of scrutiny. The museum becomes a site where spectatorship becomes entangled with expectation, projection and institutional authority. The cage is a device that turns looking itself into an ethical problem.
Looking back, it is easy to ask how audiences could have believed what they saw. How could they have been so gullible? How could they have willingly participated in such an obvious fiction? Yet standing in the Austrian Pavilion, I recognised something uncomfortable. I was no different. I, too, had entered willingly into a carefully constructed narrative. I had queued for it, desired it and invested it with meaning before it had even begun.
The recognition was pure cringe.
Yet it did not diminish the experience.
If anything, it deepened it.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
Holzinger’s SEAWORLD VENICE is without exaggeration the sharpest use of misdirection I have ever encountered. Only by entering the Austrian pavilion and experiencing the work does it reveal how unstable the categories of truth and fiction become when filtered through the authority of display. Satire requires a viewer willing to question their own interpretive habits and that examination is deeply unsettling.
It is impossible not to think of Peter Weir’s 1998 film, The Truman Show, a prescient account of contemporary spectatorship. Truman appears to occupy the centre of the world. Everything seems organised around his freedom and happiness. Gradually he discovers that what appeared authentic was carefully orchestrated, that what felt like agency was choreography and that his life exists as content for others. The revelation is that the entire world has been arranged around the act of observation.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
Leaving the pavilion, I found myself thinking again about Venice. About a city built on water and the illusion of the strange optimism required to maintain systems whose failures are already visible. SEAWORLD VENICE offers no easy escape from these contradictions. I arrived expecting to encounter a work about feminism, agency and the body. Those concerns were certainly there. But what stayed with me was something else entirely. The performance revealed the mechanisms of attention itself: our longing to belong, our attraction to spectacle, our willingness to submit to systems of value that promise proximity to something exceptional. Like Truman pressing against the painted horizon of his world, I arrived in the line for the Austrian pavilion believing I was a spectator. I left unsettled by the suspicion that I was part of the performance all along.
Art is a powerful mechanism that makes us feel and understand the world and in doing so, we participate in an ongoing negotiation between perception and reality—one that Holzinger staged with precision, revealing the architecture of attention that surrounds us and then placing us squarely inside it.
Florentina Holzinger, SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, performance documentation, Venice Biennale. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.
The title references Miranda July’s short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), borrowed here as a framing device for thinking through questions of belonging, spectatorship and proximity within the Venice Biennale.
Dina Jezdić is an art critic, curator and tauiwi decolonial scholar based in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Auckland, where her research explores contemporary art and its capacity to produce knowledge, challenge power and connect to lived experience. An Obama Foundation Leader (Asia-Pacific) and former Tate Intensive Fellow, she writes widely on contemporary art, with publications across Aotearoa, Australia and the United States.
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