La Merde

Allow me to pose a banal question, and therefore a philosophically untenable one: why does shit embarrass us when almost nothing else does?

We live in an era in which mass surveillance is accepted with the same resignation one brings to signing a fifteen-page privacy policy; in which economic violence is presented as the physiology of the market; in which the systematic humiliation of entire categories of bodies — by gender, by class, by origin, by smell — is carried out with the nonchalance of someone walking their dog. And yet. And yet it takes only the evocation of certain biological processes, only the naming of what the body expels, of what we fail to contain sufficiently, of what escapes control, and immediately the curtain of shame descends. The flush of colour. The lowered gaze. The nervous little laugh.

Bouvy understands this mechanism better than any treatise in moral philosophy. And she uses it as a scalpel.

The film — thirty-six minutes that feel like an eternity in the most Heideggerian sense, because they force you to remain with yourself in an intolerable way — follows a protagonist of rare ontological consistency: a being that is what we are accustomed to concealing. A puppet, a two-dimensional animation, a trace, an embodied presence. An entity that moves through daily life with the same wounded dignity as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of existing in a body deemed improper.

We see it in the classroom: didactic tool, object of a hygiene lesson, paradigm of the impurity to be avoided. We see it on the tram: shoved, avoided, erased from public space with the same bureaucratic efficiency with which democratic societies eliminate whatever embarrasses them. We see it in a bar, where desire is always negotiated with one's own body as currency. We see it in the solitude of a room, where containment — physical, emotional, social — reaches its saturation point and gives way.

And here Bouvy touches something truly disturbing, in the sense that "disturbing" is not a museum-label adjective but an existential condition: the moment when containment gives way is not a choice. It is a surrender. It is the point at which the body says enough before the mind does. And what is revealed — to everyone, irreversibly — is precisely what the norm had presumed to contain.

A discharge. Political. Physiological. Moral.

In the space of the Sala Armi, an LED screen four and a half metres wide by two metres tall projects images with the confidence of one who knows they need not ask permission. The quality is cinematic — Bouvy is director and screenwriter, and it shows: there is an awareness of framing, of rhythm, of the use of silence as dramatic pressure — but the context is that of installation, and this superimposition of codes produces an effect of strange dissociation: you are in a museum, but you feel as though you are at the cinema; you are at the cinema, but no one has prepared you for what you are about to see; no one has told you what to do with what you feel.

The semicircular structure that envelops the viewer — mirror glass, steel, designed by architect Antoine Rocca — is not a neutral frame. It is an elegant trap. It reflects you as you watch. It places you inside the scene. You cannot observe the excrement-being from a safe distance because the mirrored surface constantly positions you within the visual field: you are there, you are part of the work, you are — if you have the courage to follow the argument to its conclusion — it.

The sound, conceived by Pierre Dozin with instruments that evolve in real time, does not accompany the image: it inhabits it. It transforms the air of the room into a substance. The soundscape is a living organism that breathes around you, that shifts, that presses. No distance is possible. This is the gentle violence of the installation: it does not shout at you. It envelops you.

And then there is him. Or her. Or the thing.

Bouvy merges her own body with that of E.T. — Spielberg's extraterrestrial, creature of absolute otherness that Hollywood had transformed into a Christmas gift plushie — to produce E.T. The Excremential: sculpture, alter ego, embodied manifesto. The fusion is deliberately grotesque and deliberately tender. Because E.T. was already, in its original narrative structure, the story of a wrong body in a world that refuses to accept it: alien by definition, desired for its difference, then normalised, commercialised, domesticated by the entertainment industry until rendered harmless.

Bouvy does not normalise it. She reintroduces it into the field of the abject, where perhaps it had always belonged, and uses it to remind us that the "difference" celebrated by mass culture is always a difference already digested, already rendered palatable, already drained of its power to disturb.

What truly disturbs is not celebrated. It is expelled.

It is difficult not to read La Merde as a political gesture — and "difficult" here means "impossible for anyone not actively pretending not to understand."

At a historical moment in which mechanisms of social exclusion are reorganising themselves at a speed that would make twentieth-century regimes envious; in which bodies are systematically hierarchised, classified, tolerated or rejected according to criteria of cleanliness — physical, moral, ethnic, sexual — that have nothing natural about them and everything constructed; in which modesty is deployed selectively, as an instrument of control rather than of dignity: at this moment, bringing to the Venice Biennale a film about an excrement-being is not an adolescent provocation. It is a diagnosis.

Bouvy inherits Rabelais — that carnivalesque vein that used the lower bodily stratum to dismantle authority — but carries it into the lexicon of theoretical feminism, of power analysis, of reflection on abjection as a zone of instability between order and chaos. Kristeva is in the DNA of the work, even if she is never named. Shit as that which confounds categories. As that which threatens the coherence of the subject. As that which transgresses symbolic boundaries.

And the symbolic boundary, here, is also the physical one of the Sala Armi: a space historically dedicated to weapons — to the instruments of military control, of the monopoly on legitimate violence — now occupied by a being that exists precisely because control has given way.

Leaving the Sala Armi — one does leave, eventually, even if Dozin's audio spatialisation makes one almost wish otherwise — one has the strange and mildly nauseating impression of having been caught in something. Not in a specific act. In a general posture. In that tacit convention by which we inhabit our own bodies and judge those of others, by which we decide what may be seen and what must remain hidden, by which we apply our sense of propriety with a selectivity that reveals exactly who we are and what we are protecting.

Aline Bouvy offers no catharsis. She is not so generous. She offers mirrors — literally, in the architectural structure; metaphorically, in every sequence of the film — and leaves you alone with the reflection.

The Venice Biennale has seen more beautiful things. It has rarely seen anything more necessary.