OUT OF THE BOX - Nora-Swantje Almes

CH You have worked across institutions in Berlin, Bergen, Glasgow, or London. What is a conviction about art or curating that you held ten years ago and no longer believe?

NA Ten years ago, I started working in curating. Although I already had some professional experience, I was still at the beginning of my curatorial studies and believed that all curatorial work had to start from a theoretical framework. At the time, I questioned my approach to closely follow artistic practices, artists’ ideas, and ways of thinking, and to understand them as the departure point for curatorial projects and research. Over the years, this understanding has shifted. Many institutions, including the Gropius Bau, where I've worked since autumn 2024, embrace this artist-centred approach.

CH How did your collaboration with Florentina Holzinger for the Austrian Pavilion come about and what made it shift from a curatorial decision into a genuinely shared artistic process?

NA I had a fascination for Florentina’s work since her most toured show, 'TANZ,' but I thought any institution’s production team would kill me for the idea of bringing it into a visual arts space. After she did her Étude at Schinkel Pavillon, I approached her with a new commission idea in public space for Bergen Kunsthall, where I worked at the time. It took us around 1.5 years to create appropriate conditions for it. We realised the Harbour Étude in Bergen in 2024 through a week of hard work and hard rain. On Florentina's site visits, we started to talk about Venice. Shortly after the production, she called me to ask whether we wanted to submit a proposal for the Austrian Pavilion together. Of course, I couldn’t say no – it was an invitation to work on a seven-month experiment in bringing performance into a very particular visual arts space.

CH People often romanticize close curator artist collaborations. During the development of SEAWORLD VENICE were there moments when you and Florentina wanted fundamentally different things and had to decide whether to follow through anyway?

NA Florentina works with a trusted team that she has been building over the last decade. Everyone has their expertise. I have been one part of it. Decisions often depend on various factors – the question was more often: do the structural conditions allow us to follow through? I ask questions, I flag things, but more to get closer to the artistic vision. Generally, I work in a very artist-led way and understand my role as a collaborator, and that role is flexible from project to project. I try to create the conditions for the work to unfold. For SEAWORLD VENICE, and Florentina’s work generally, it is down to teamwork. Of course, there have been moments of lengthy discussions – everyone wants to get to the best result. Luckily we did not have fundamentally different ideas about how to approach the Pavilion, but I’ll also say that ultimately, for me, the artist has the final say.

CH You described SEAWORLD VENICE as an apocalyptic scenario that is already here. If everything is already happening what is art still supposed to do that reality itself is not already doing?

NA The core part of SEAWORLD VENICE is a water tank where a performer lives in the waste of others – quite literally: she lives in the filtered urine of the visitors. It is an ambiguous image – the performer can be seen as a self-sacrificing altar figure, a hybrid creature from the future, or the orca of SeaWorld. It is a comment on the current state and order of the world, where vulnerable populations are relegated to the waste of the powerful. In parts of the world, this is a reality that can be easily ignored while sipping a Spritz at the Canal Grande. Florentina’s practice makes visible what usually remains hidden. The visitors of SEAWORLD VENICE become actively complicit in these cycles, as we all are in the systems of the world – the difference is that these confrontational moments make people aware of their position and point to a shared responsibility.

CH How do you personally relate to working inside the Austrian Pavilion as a historically loaded space and what does it mean for you to operate within a format that is expected to represent a nation while the artistic project itself resists fixed ideas of identity and authorship?

NA The Pavilion was built by Josef Hoffmann in 1934 – he was a benefactor of the Nazis and, together with the church builder Robert Kramreiter, created this slick art temple. Of course, this was an important reference point for us when thinking about the triptych of SEAWORLD VENICE as a sacred building, a sewage treatment plant, and an underwater theme park. The project engages with questions around purity and impurity, cleanliness and dirt – and the rewriting of narratives. Inhabiting the Pavilion over the duration of the Biennale can also be seen as a gesture of reclaiming that space. The team consists of people from 17 different nationalities, so the project itself and its team structure also deconstruct the 19th-century logic of the National Pavilion.

CH Venice is a city struggling with mass tourism while simultaneously profiting from it. Did you ever worry that SEAWORLD VENICE risks becoming another version of the very condition it critiques?

NA From the beginning, we were very aware of the paradox of presenting a work that engages with sustainability and collapsing systems in this context. Venice is the perfect setting – suspended between beauty and collapse. Florentina sometimes jokes that the concept derived from the sustainability concept we had to hand in as part of the proposal. We live in contradictions, and we have to navigate our way through them. In the upholding of these systems, the Biennale visitors are complicit, and so are we.

CH SEAWORLD VENICE incorporates visitors physical presence into the work itself. Where do you draw the line between participation and exploitation is there a point at which involvement stops being empowering and becomes instrumentalized?

NA It is true that there is a co-dependency on the audience in the work. They are needed to keep the Pavilion flooded and the artwork running. However, the participation and physical donations, are voluntary. The cleaning ladies – the performers – are the amazing hosts of the Pavilion. They guide people, answer questions. We were told that the Austrian Pavilion has the cleanest toilets in the Giardini, so one could even see it as an act of public service.

CH The Venice Biennale is frequently described as a space where political critique is absorbed into an institutional spectacle. Can it still generate real friction or have both the national pavilion model and institutional critique itself become part of the format?

NA The Venice Biennale and contemporary art are a context where the tensions of the world become visible – and rightly so – in a global context and on an international stage. Especially in this iteration of the Biennale, it has become clear that the old systems don’t work anymore. So it feels particularly fitting that SEAWORLD VENICE imagines the possibility of a new direction, with a resistance figure at its core, a collective that rings out the old systems every hour and rings in new times. There is a great energy of care in the Pavilion amongst the performers. In the best case, this empowering collective strength transcends to the audience. It is not about passive observation, but about active engagement.

CH Looking at the art world today what is the conversation everyone keeps having that you wish would finally disappear?

NA Performance is still considered a second-class discipline within contemporary art. Curators before me have worked hard to establish infrastructures within institutions, but the accommodation of bodies – especially over long durations – comes with a different set of challenges that still seem difficult to navigate institutionally. While I believe we are past "performance as a sensation" in the visual arts and that there is, overall, an increasing awareness of what it takes, I would love for this discipline and other more hybrid practices not to be looked at as add-ons, but to be acknowledged as integral and equal to more conventional exhibition formats. Let’s hope the presence of strong performance-based Pavilions at this year's Venice Biennale contributes to shifting this perspective.