Radical, lively, uncompromising: Florentina Holzinger's work is among the most impressive that the cultural scene currently has to offer.
Holzinger will represent her home country of Austria at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and from the 2026/27 season she will be part of the artistic management team of the Berlin Volksbühne. In excessive stage spectacles, the Viennese choreographer liberates the female body from beauty norms and role models to show it in all its vulnerability and strength. The asphalt Festival has been showing Holzinger's genre-busting works since the beginning of her career and is now presenting her latest work as a co-production. "A Year without Summer" was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen 2026 as one of the ten most remarkable productions of the season.
Originally, 1816 went down in history as the "year without a summer". After the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, the sky is full of ash, the sun has disappeared, the harvests have failed - and the world is starving. 18-year-old Mary spends the cold summer months with other poets on Lake Geneva, where the storm and darkness inspire her to write horror stories. Mary imagines Dr Frankenstein, a scientific genius who forces nature to bend to his will and ends up destroying his monster made of corpse parts. (Source: asphalt Festival gGmbH)
