Florentina Holzinger is bringing SEAWORLD VENICE, her much-discussed contribution to the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, to a close with a Closing Étude on November 21 at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice. The finale caps seven months of daily performances commissioned by the Hartwig Art Foundation.

The centrepiece of the closing is Holzinger's emblematic bell, retrieved from the lagoon during the project's Opening Étude and rung every hour at the pavilion throughout the run. In a ceremonial procession it will travel to the historic building for a final collective celebration. When the bell falls silent and the water stops circulating, SEAWORLD VENICE comes to an end.

The closing then moves to a final dinner — the last Venice Étude in Holzinger's ongoing series of site-specific actions, which she has been developing since 2020. The dinner traces a material transformation from solid to liquid and forges a relic: all the bodily waste collected from pavilion visitors over the past seven months will be distilled, with the leftover presented as a monument for the future. The outcome will be shown in front of the closed Austrian Pavilion on November 22.

The finale is consistent with a project that became the biennale's most talked-about show. At the Austrian Pavilion, Holzinger flooded the severe modernist building with water, invited visitors to contribute urine through two bright-blue portable toilets feeding a large tank, kept a performer submerged for hours wearing only a scuba mask, and sent a naked performer circling on a jet ski.

Critics described the installation as a dystopian universe drowning into oblivion — a closed-circuit system in which bodily fluids became, in the artist's words, an abject architectural reality of the pavilion. The closing dinner promises one last test of how far audiences will follow her.