Opening Étude, SEAWORLD VENICE - Florentina Holzinger
"Over the next hour, we heard an exquisite drone music concert played by an ensemble of nude women on the other barge. One of Holzinger’s performers held a guitar as she climbed up the enormous crane. A water ambulance rode by, just in case. The show had two climaxes. The first was the revelation of what had been hiding in the water. Lying dormant during the concert, and now being lifted out from underneath the surface, was a metal bell from which something hung upside down: a body. The whole time, Holzinger herself had been in the lagoon. At that moment—as she came out, silent, still, and naked—she seemed blue and lifeless. I wouldn’t have really put it past her to become unconscious as a form of extreme performance. Then, as the audience raised their phones, she began to pivot sideways inside the bell, so that it cast out its funereal tones across the water, ringing out back toward Giudecca and Saint Mark’s."
