Aline Bouvy's 'La Merde' at the Luxembourg Pavilion: Shit as Political Force

Aline Bouvy represents Luxembourg at the 2026 Venice Biennale with her film essay 'La Merde,' which centers on excrement as a destabilizing force. The film, originally conceived as a performance, explores circulation, digestion, and transformation, challenging notions of shame and bodily autonomy. Bouvy shot sequences in wastewater treatment plants, drawing parallels to the separation of clean and dirty water. She connects her work to a lineage of artists from Bruegel to Hundertwasser and Florentina Holzinger, whose 'Sancta' she admired. The project includes a publication acting as a visual archive of abjection and visibility politics. Bouvy emphasizes the grotesque and clownish as tools to disrupt order and expose hypocrisy, noting the historical exclusion of women from clowning as a political act. The exhibition will travel to the Kunstverein in Salzburg after the Biennale. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the pavilion was developed without overthinking the Biennale context, but Bouvy now feels pressure due to the event's scale.