Pollock: Do you play any instruments? Are you musical?

Holzinger: Yes, piano. I played piano a lot as a child, but not anymore.

Pollock: There is a musical way of thinking throughout.

Holzinger: Definitely. The bell is rung hourly. Also, around Venice, every hour, a bell announces the time. Take the San Marco bell, where you can find an old person depicted, ringing out the old time, while the young person brings in the new. For us, the whole pavilion almost functions like clockwork—a constant energy input is needed, or urine input is needed to keep the machine running.

Pollock: For the Étude, I arrived early because I was afraid of missing the ferry. I already needed to pee, but it wasn’t possible on the ferry or on the viewing barge. I then waited for the return ferry. I rushed to the pavilion, which involved another long wait—two and a half hours—with no chance to use a restroom.

Holzinger: Oh my. [Laughing]

Pollock: It was the perfect introduction to SEAWORLD. When I finally got inside, where two portable toilets standing like a shrine surrounding the performer inside the piss tank. Waiting in line for the loo, one of your team, whom I recognized from A Year Without Summer—dressed as a cleaning woman—approached me. She instructed me to sit while peeing; I tried to laugh that off, as men don’t do that in the US or the UK, but she insisted: “This is a self-sustaining ecosystem … and an autonomous independent state within the Biennale.” It was humbling to contribute to SEAWORLD.

Holzinger: [Laughs] You know, that is similar to the origin story: behind the Austrian Pavilion, it always smells like piss, as it’s at the end of the pavilions—somewhat hidden and in the back, so last time I also peed there, rather than join the ridiculous queues for the permanent toilets.

Pollock: Did you ever meet with Koyo Kouoh?

Holzinger: No, because by the time she was announced as the curator, we already knew what we were going to do. So, no—there was no context.

Pollock: SEAWORLD is a great fit for the concept of “In Minor Keys.” It’s been a year since we did our first interview, and you were revealing your Venice plans. Now that it has opened, how does it compare?

Holzinger: It’s still a work in progress, and it will change a lot. Of course, the pre-opening was absurd, and already by the second week, there was a different dynamic and flow. You remember the first week was like everybody with their phones? This is not the case anymore.

Pollock: I was in Venice, but I won’t be able to attend Prinzendorf. For the work in Venice, there seemed an issue of it not being processed by much of the public—just blindly posted online Later, social media has created this ravenous, and for whatever it’s worth, it’s not the work anymore. It’s quite dead, for a piece that is so alive.

Holzinger: Yes, it went everywhere, and it is dead; it makes everything super singular.

Pollock: We’re all forced into these in-between spaces—checking online, either reading or posting—essentially leaving us nowhere. What I admire in you, which comes from theater, is that you put the audience in the moment, the now.

Holzinger: For sure, it relates strongly to my theater background, being very experienced with that, so we always strongly consider the audience experience.

Pollock: Your piece has a reflexive function, and at times felt like being part of a great sociological experiment: however we behaved—watching the nude performers, queuing, the loos, filming—we were also being observed, like animals in a zoo.

It was also a stroke of genius that you had your team cleaning in uniforms. They were totally invisible to the crowd, just cleaners.

Holzinger: Totally, I love it.

Pollock: While the other performers are naked, they’re the only ones with clothes, identifiable as cleaners by their uniform. They’re interacting with the crowd, but they are not getting the respect they would have if people knew they were part of the company. I haven’t read a single mention of this, and of course, the fact that all of you are women.

Holzinger: This is also something we only realized much later in the process—how important the role of this toilet woman is, and what a rich figure she is—because in the first week, it was really like people would come in and treat the cleaning women like they are shit. I would also clean in uniform, and members of the public would ask me when Florentina Holzinger is performing. “Where is the artist?” And there I am on my knees.

It’s so funny—it brings all of the class dynamics into the light.

Pollock: Yes, the open-minded, left-leaning art world, at its best.

There was a question I asked during our last interview about whether you’d consider a collaboration with a fashion brand to finance something ambitious, and your answer stuck with me: “That would depend on our punk souls.”

One year later, with SEAWORLD open, and two more events just days away, my question is: how is your punk soul?

Holzinger: My punk soul is quite happy with Venice, because people have such big problems with it.

Pollock: Here in Austria as well.

Holzinger: Especially in Austria, crazy.

Pollock: Since Venice, the reporting has labelled you as a product of the progressive Austrian art scene, but you actually developed your work for twenty years abroad. Austria may have a wild reputation from the Actionists during the sixties, but things are way more conservative than that; now, it’s mostly a passive-aggressive position.

Also, a lot of the talk has been really bad, especially among women—even female curators.

Holzinger: Yeah, no, I know—people are so provoked. I’m like, “What the fuck?” Some are equating our choreography as using nudity as its selling point—a misogynistic prejudgment. Actually, the most misogynistic thing you can say to anybody. It seems that the consensus is that the only reason for a woman to get naked is financial.

For this piece, we were reflecting a lot on the history of Venice as an important place for sex workers—where sex workers could arrive at a certain emancipation, a chance for upward mobility, and to become part of an intellectual elite. What would even be bad about that?

Pollock: What is the most outrageous thing that will happen in Prinzendorf? Nitsch is buried in the grounds. Will he roll over in his grave?

Holzinger: That is a sensitive thing.

Pollock: Surprisingly, he had a Catholic funeral.

Holzinger: Really?

Pollock: Yes. I would have figured that he would have chosen a Dionysian death—sacrificed by frenzied Maenads, like Pentheus in Euripides.

Holzinger: [Laughs]