What if shit could talk? Well, it does. And it speaks in floods out of the sewers of shame.

Aline Bouvy presents La Merde, an immersive audiovisual installation commissioned for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The work brings together a film, a spatialized sound composition, and a mirror-glassed steel architecture that reorganizes the viewer’s position in space, both physically and socially.

At its core is a cinematographic essay structured as a manifesto: La Merde addresses shame as a social mechanism and traces the thresholds through which bodies are classified, tolerated, disciplined, or pushed out of view. It proposes a reflection on the systemic violence that shapes lives and behaviors. Through the figure of an anthropomorphic excrement, appearing as a puppet, an animation, a trace, and an embodied presence, the film moves across everyday situations where restraint is learned, performed, and enforced, until it reaches a public confrontation that turns the work into a direct encounter with collective judgment.

Installed within a semi-circular viewing structure, the film is experienced through a continuously reconfigured, spatialized sound environment, while the mirrored surfaces extend the work into the pavilion space, multiplying reflections and doubling the question of identification: who is looking, who is being looked at, and what remains impossible to contain.

Accompanying La Merde, the eponymous publication is conceived as a dense yet accessible book-object and visual manifesto that traces dejection as matter, metaphor, and political act across time. With a preface by Stilbé Schroeder (curator of the Pavilion) and Mirela Baciak (director of Salzburger Kunstverein), and commissioned texts by Robert Garnett and Jessica Gysel, it can be considered a work in its own right, both conceptual and sensory.

Artistic team