The dystopia of our time gives meaning to Florentina Holzinger's art.

Climate crisis and genocide, necro-capitalism, dysfunctional democracies, and technological

Harbour etude

Choreography, concept, and direction by Florentina Holzinger

Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes

Performers: Andrea Baker, Annina Machaz, Blathin Eckhardt, Born in Flamez, Florentina Holzigner, Gibrana Cervantes, Fleshpiece, otay:onii, Luna Duran, Netti Nüganen, Sophie Duncan, Xana Novais.

The performance is commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall in cooperation with Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, and with support from the Federal Ministry of the Republic of Austria: Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Brynildsens Legat, Bergesenstiftelsen, EGD, Bergen Kommune and the Austrian Embassy, Oslo.

August 24, 2024, Smien Laksevåg Verft, Bergen

authoritarianism – we are destroying our living conditions at breakneck speed. Never has the universe witnessed a species as cannibalistic as humans. We know everything but are unable to stop accelerating towards the abyss. The systems we have created threaten our existence, and the prospect of a future seems bleak. This vulnerability is a meaningful starting point for understanding Florentina Holzinger’s art.

In Holzinger’s universe, the body takes centre stage in performances that measure human vulnerability and strength against those of machines and nature. Bodies endowed with superpowers and impossibly high pain thresholds create images by means of choreography, acrobatics, body art, sex, and stunt-like feats of daring. The performances borrow freely from circus acts, amateur theatre, and freak shows as well as dance, opera, concerts and performance art; thematically they draw on anything from Greek mythology and religion to punk, classical drama and reality TV. The result comes across as anti-theatre, anti-text, anti-opera, anti-narrative – in short, an anti-art practice. The most enduring feature of these Gesamtkunstwerk experiences is the focus on the physical capacities of the body in extreme situations and (mostly) gigantic productions, whether on stages or in public spaces – situations that are also free from any trace of patriarchal legacies. In Holzinger’s universe, the male gaze is simply out of the equation.

The Harbour Etude presents no exception to this idiosyncratic performance style, with its forceful images, huge machines, naked bodies and physically demanding performances. At the far end of a concrete pier at a shipyard in Laksevåg, a 70-metre-high crane, a helicopter, a rescue boat, a fishing boat, and two forklifts create a backdrop against which eight naked women, including Holzinger herself, act out a carefully planned choreography that is simultaneously left open to the randomness of natural elements: the sea, the wind and the weather. Led by two punk sirens of sorts equipped with bass guitars being shipped to the pier by a fishing boat, the performance proceeds slowly and noisily towards a climax, in which Holzinger and a fellow performer are hoisted up to the top of the crane from where the sounds they make by beating hammers against bronze bells and oversized wind chimes made of hollow metal pipes is accompanied by the screaming sirens on the pier and a helicopter circling above. In the final movements of the performance, forklifts and cranes are used to hoist up three other naked sirens by hooks attached to the skin on their backs. The performance culminates with a naked woman whose long raven-black hair is swirling high up in the air, flanked some 20 meters below by the other two who are hanging from wires attached to forklifts, all with hooks threaded into their bleeding backs.

The images are elaborate, baroque. And as is usual in so much performance art, the audience members primarily serve as extras for documentary purposes. We are witnessing a high-risk sport where the athletes may fall onto the concrete pier when the skin on their back is stretched to breaking point, or where the circling helicopter can crash into the crane and explode. The audience’s status is that of a witness to a possible catastrophe. Holzinger says of her etudes that they constitute a space in which she can test stunts and ideas without an overarching dramaturgy or narrative. The etudes also often serve as preparatory work for elements in more elaborate stage productions, and the pieces, like an etude format in classical music, are about perfecting complex parts that require special technical skills. The Harbour Etude is thus an exercise in the use of human wind chimes, helicopter dives, and self-harm; an exercise in pathos, eccentrism, and authentic risk, and the body is the instrument on which it is played.

For Holzinger, the training and perfecting of skills is an artistic goal: «What is physically possible is often that which the mind can comprehend, so I try to educate my mind more than anything», she stated in an interview. And because Holzinger’s staged feats are also real feats in the sense that the performing bodies are real, and because the study format, just like a sketch, is unprocessed, unfinished, undigested, it is also a strangely liberating experience. It does not make sense to try to rationalise what we see. The Harbour Etude is not a claim or an argument; it can perhaps best be understood as a guttural roar protesting the power of language and knowledge, and an illustration of what the Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés calls a posthumous condition. According to her, we live without being able to imagine a future because we do not know how to survive the disasters we have triggered. We know everything that is to know, but science doesn’t make sense because it can no longer solve our problems. Garcés claims that the only way to avoid extinction is a radical enlightenment project; we must expand our knowledge and use it in a new way. To rephrase it with Holzinger: If physical realities are the limits of what we can imagine, then the most important thing we can do is expand our imagination.

As a survival strategy for our time where noisy, angry superheroines have the leading role, the Harbour Etude points not least to the real heroes of our time, those who rescue boat refugees in the Mediterranean and those who save lives in Gaza, Sudan and Democratic Republic of the Congo, amid many other contemporary tragedies, as well as those who work to improve our living conditions, and whose superpowers are rooted in basic humanity: At the cliff’s edge that is our powerlessness, such qualities have too often been relegated to agencies outside ourselves. By demonstrating the strength of human bodies and their abilities to play, cooperate, and overcome the challenges of machines and nature, the performance leaves you with a sense of exhaustion that is also liberating since the vision of so much courage and strength provides a vision of the possibility of becoming something other than what we are, something more and better. This is the very point of departure for freedom.

Marina Garcés insists that in order to create a livable future for ourselves we must eliminate the belief in and submissiveness to the systems under which we currently exist. In New Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World (2017), she concludes: «Against apocalyptic dogma and messianic or solutionist monochrony (either damnation or salvation), the sense of learning is to work in an alliance of knowledges that combines scepticism and trust. I imagine the new radical enlightenment as the work of rebellious weavers, sceptical and trusting at the same time. We are capable of saying we do not believe you, while, from many places, we refashion the threads of time and of the world with fine-tuned, inexhaustible tools.»*

Holzinger’s art similarly takes us to the vortex of our precarious times, when everything we do based on everything we know contrasts with how we might actually want to live. In this way, her art protests against too-fast interpretations, conclusions and instrumental superstructures. It is as if she is saying, «Look at us, see what we are capable of» – like children do when they want attention, overwhelmed by their bodies’ liberating skills. Holzinger and her crew are the weavers of our time, tirelessly stretching human limits to expand the knowledge of our species. And it points to a future, one where there are still people.

Footnotes

*New Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World, Garcés, Marina. Original title: Nueva ilustración radical (2017).