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 spatialised sound composition, and a mirror-glassed steel architecture that reorganises 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 behaviours.
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, spatialised 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.
Credits:
-
Film Producer:
Escautville – Ulrike Lindmayr, Vincent Stroep
-
Co-Producers:
Animal Tank,
Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain,
Salzburger Kunstverein
-
Written and directed by:
Aline Bouvy
-
Co-Screenwriter:
François Pirot
-
Outside Eye:
Tanguy Poujol
-
Line Producer:
Ravit Bechor
-
Cast:
La Merde: Lucie Debay
Teacher: Damien Chapelle
Charlie: Marc Guillaume
Carole: Louise Manteau
Nadia: Marie Bos
Audience:
Charlotte Beaudry, Boris Bermond, Jonathan
Boutefeu, Manoah Camporini, Sofia Chalaguina, Vincent
Chenut, Felix Daoust, Michael Debatty, Garance Debert,
Lisa Dellugat, Alexandre De Menditte, Ann De Nys, Emeline Depas, Thomas Depas, Garance Debert, Robin Faymonville,
Tristan Gac, Cécile Gentili, Maxim Goossens, Jose
Haberland, Guillaume Jannes, Régis Jocteur- Monrozier, Francesca Krol, Louis Lallier, Alizée Loubet, Willie Morlon, Carole Mousset, Batsheva Ross, Manuel Sajn, Mey Semtati,
Menen Szymon, Romane van Walré de Bordes, Nathalie
Wathelet, Walter Wathieu
School children:
Django d’Adesky, Pietro Aiena, Liberté Bayar, Soleil Bayar, Joon Nguyen, Marceau Roussev
-
Crew:
Director of Photography: Olivier Boonjing
Additional Photography: Hugo Boutry, Aline Bouvy,
Emeline Depas, Tanguy Poujol, Armand Verlooy, Rivka Zame
Second Camera Operator: Nicolas Savary
Camera Assistant: Aurélien Dehin
Second Camera Assistant: Lisa Billuart-Monet
Sound Mixer: Feras Daouk
Boom Operator: Eran Ben Isaac, Eliott Puttemans
Assistant Director: Yann Wauters
Script Supervisor: Zoé Roland
Production Coordinator: Charles Kinoo
Production Assistants: Paola Unzalu-Burnaz, Armand Verlooy
Production Design: Ravit Bechor
Special Effects Costume and Mask: Oriande De Neve
Set Photographer: Hugo Boutry
-
Post-production:
Post-Production Coordinator: Julien Sigalas
Image Editor: Laurence Vaes
Sound Mixing and Editing: Pierre Dozin – Sonic Shelter
Original Score and Sound Design: Late Bush
2D Animation: Lora D’Adazzio
3D Animation: Raphaël Massart
Visual Effects: Boris Wilmot
-
Locations:
Brussels-Luxembourg Station;
Brussels-South Wastewater Treatment Plant;
Café Central;
Le Cheval Marin;
Peter Pan School;
WIELS Contemporary Art Centre
-
Financial support:
Flanders Audiovisual Fund – VAF (development),
Flanders State of the Art,
Tax Shelter measure of the Belgian Federal
Government through Flanders Tax Shelter
Screenings:
-
2026: Luxembourg Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale (IT)