Interview with Aline Bouvy on Filth and Form
By Anaïs Castro, for Daily Lazy
Conducted a few weeks before the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, this conversation with Aline Bouvy unfolds ahead of the inauguration of the Luxembourg Pavilion, where she will premiere La Merde, her debut film. While the pavilion will reactivate an installation previously presented in the context of her solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg in 2025, it is the film that marks a decisive shift in her practice. Developed over nearly a year and a half, but stemming from an idea she had in mind for many years prior to that, Bouvy tells me how her cinematic essay functions as an extended process of inquiry that deepens longstanding concerns in her work.
The move into film, she explains, was neither immediate nor self-evident. It evolved through a combination of production frameworks, conversations, collaborations, and a deliberate engagement with the technical and conceptual demands of cinema. Supported by the VAF in Flanders and working with a professional crew, Bouvy also undertook her own training in filmmaking to understand the possibilities and limitations of the moving image. The result she notes, is strikingly composed, at times even seductive, generating a deliberate dissonance with the subject matter it covers. This tension is heightened by the soundscape composed by Pierre Dozin (Late Bush), an evolving, algorithmically generated score that lends the film’s central figure an almost sentient presence.
At the center of La Merde is a figure Bouvy describes as an être-étron, or “stool-being.” Neither fully character nor pure symbol, this ambiguous entity moves through a series of loosely connected scenes, resisting any linear narrative. In one sequence, a puppet shaped like excrement is used by a teacher to instruct children in hygiene protocols; in another, the turdfigure drifts through a bar trying to attract a mate. These episodes, at once absurd and strangely familiar, construct a world in which the grotesque, the abject, and the parodic coexist. “It’s something universal,” Bouvy notes, “but surrounded by shame.” By centering the work on excrement—arguably the most culturally repressed of materials—she probes the mechanisms that govern visibility and exclusion. What is systematically hidden? What is deemed unworthy of representation?
The registers she mobilizes remain historically charged, particularly for women artists. The grotesque and the abject, she suggests, offer a form of freedom, but one that is not easily inhabited. Here, humor and self-deprecation play a crucial role, though always tinged with discomfort. Rather than relying on overt provocation, the work operates through subtle destabilization. This tension is further intensified by the decision to render the central figure as female-presenting, performed by actress Lucie Debay. To embody such a degraded form, Bouvy acknowledges, is to enter a complex field of projection and power. Yet it is precisely within this discomfort that the work locates its critical potential. “These extremes,” she reflects, “allow access to things that are not supposed to be addressed.”
At times, the figure takes on an almost alien quality as an ambiguous presence that resists stable identification. Bouvy embraces this association, describing it as an increasingly important metaphor in her work. To become alien, in this sense, is not simply to be othered, but to step outside normative frameworks, particularly those shaped by patriarchal expectations. The installation embodies this logic through a sculpture that merges the extraterrestrial figure from Steven Spielberg’s iconic film E.T the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with the artist’s own face and body, resulting in E.T The Excremental (sculpture title).
Beyond its symbolic charge, La Merde also engages with the material infrastructures that structure contemporary life. Filmed in part in a wastewater treatment plant, it brings into view systems that are essential yet systematically concealed. Through the figure of excrement, questions of circularity, transformation, and regeneration come to the fore. In a society that celebrates consumption while snubbing what is expelled, Bouvy points to a fundamental continuity—one that connects the body to broader ecological and planetary cycles.
Throughout our exchange, Bouvy returns to the idea of the exhibition as a medium in itself. For her, it is not simply a container for works, but a stage on which relationships are orchestrated—between objects, images, bodies, and viewers. In Venice, this logic materializes through a semi-spherical structure made of one-way mirrors that gathers visitors within it, enveloping them in what she describes as a kind of collective headset Nearby, an LED screen presents the film, establishing yet another, fictional audience. The film thus functions as a site of convergence.
Describing La Merde as a “collective laxative,” Bouvy invokes an image that is at once crude and suggestive. It points to release, to circulation, to the possibility of movement where there is blockage. This notion of flow—bodily, social, ecological—runs throughout the project, complicating its engagement with abjection by insisting on transformation rather than stasis.
Ultimately, Bouvy resists framing the work in terms of a clear message. “I’m trying to create an experience,” she says. One defined by friction, displacement, and a lingering sense of unease. The goal is not a resolution, but an aftereffect: something that persists, circulates, and quietly unsettles. Like its central figure, La Merde refuses containment. It seeps, disrupts, and reconfigures—asserting, in its very instability, its necessity.