"Scheiße hat die Kraft, Ordnungssysteme zu destabilisieren"
Aline Bouvy, the artist representing Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale, has created a film essay titled "La Merde" that centers on excrement as its main character. Originally conceived as a performance, the work explores themes of bodily circulation, transformation, and the grotesque, using feces to challenge societal taboos and systems of order. Bouvy discusses the film's development with curator Stilbé Schroeder, noting that the Biennale provided the resources and time to realize the project, which will later travel to the Kunstverein in Salzburg.
This matters because Bouvy's work taps into a broader contemporary art discourse around bodily autonomy, waste, and ecological cycles, linking her project to other Biennale presentations like Florentina Holzinger's in the Austrian Pavilion. By making a universally taboo subject the centerpiece of a national pavilion, Bouvy questions notions of national identity, control, and the boundaries between clean and dirty, inviting viewers to confront their own discomfort and projections. The film's emphasis on circulation and transformation resonates with current environmental and political conversations about sustainability and the interconnectedness of all systems.