A monumental blow-up doll depicting Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde cuts a weird figure atop Stalinist socialist architecture. But this is Berlin’s Volksbühne (the people’s theater), and there’s always something surprising on its rooftop. This summer, the building was adorned with the words People’s Pool (Volksbad) when the theater’s new artistic director, Matthias Lilienthal, opened a public swimming pool in front of it, causing waves in the media over its price tag of €410,000. After a planned swimming day for people of color turned the pool into the center of the culture war, there was another sign, this time on the grass: fuck you.
Suffice it to say the Courbet doll, the main prop of Florentina Holzinger’s new piece, doesn’t cause anyone around here to flinch, even if the strings tying the female body down give the whole thing a bit of a bondage flair. On this balmy October evening, people eat popcorn and drink beer, waiting for the Venice Biennale star to open Lilienthal’s first season. There are children, parked bikes, cigarettes being rolled—and soon, half a dozen naked bodies, including Holzinger’s, careening off the building with rags in their hands.
Holzinger is right—as she once told me, Berlin is “fucking ugly” (but it is our ugly and we love it). The current political climate probably hasn’t made it much nicer. So perhaps the place does need a bit of a wash.
More Florentina? People have asked me this more than a few times lately. Her troupe of powerful performers, her shock tactics, unease and extreme physicality have been on rotation in Berlin for years. Her home base is the Volksbühne, where she was an associate artist under René Pollesch, Lilienthal's predecessor, and staged at least two dozen evenings there. Last month she turned up on screen during Berlin Art Week. In February 2027, her acclaimed Austrian pavilion from Venice lands at the Gropius Bau. Then next September, she opens the Komische Oper's 2027/28 season at the former Tempelhof airport.
But once House Wash begins, you see why more Florentina is never a bad thing.
Performance art is everywhere these days, but Holzinger’s got talent. She understands theater and choreography. Her multitalented troupe can actually play their instruments, swallow flagpoles, hang by their hair, and do dangerous-looking things with heavy machinery—which they make look not only simple but quite fun. Holzinger is a fine-tuned master of maximalism; her works become breeding grounds for catharsis, chaos, charisma, and comedy in a careful balance.
House Wash begins with doom metal, as naked musicians appear one by one at the edge of the roof. Soon, several launch themselves off the side, surviving thanks to cables, and wipe down the colossal letters of the theater’s name. On two white canvases flanking the building, performers graffiti the somewhat clunky phrase “Volks Falls.” Why? The answer arrived via water, piped in dead center, gushing up between the legs of L’Origine du monde. The fountain, seemingly billed as a waterfall, reads like one big bodily shower. Given that this is where the pool erupted into a debate over what bodies belongs here, that feels more than fitting.
More interesting still is the angle of thinking about women, having been relegated to domestic and invisible labor like cleaning and housework for centuries, doing this loud, pompous wipe down of the house. It is loaded and transgressive especially against this piece of macho socialist architecture. “The house must be clean to give birth to new ideas,” yelled one performer, as another waved a white flag.
And there it is: surrendering our ennui and boredom, ready for the radical. The institution needs to be rinsed so something new can happen. Our scene requires a new feeling. And Lilienthal has arrived with the promise of new ideas and a clear political position, with Holzinger here to usher in the next phase with a good sweep.
And Holzinger is not exactly new to this house. She has become part of the institution, which makes House Wash stranger than a simple act of rebellion. The person washing the house is herself basically a family member, not "the help."
Inside and outside of Berlin, the art world is in a scramble for the new, as circuitous talk of malaise slides into nearly every conversation. Keeping everyone happy—the viewers, politicians, and press—is getting harder. Lilienthal seems to have decided not to bother, that maybe the point is not to keep everyone happy but to take a position and make a mess. So yes, sure, more. Always more. Until the next new idea.