A Public Execution
© By Keike Twisselmann
On the myth of claiming land
This performance enacted a public execution with real blood, a flag and a real axe at a place where once the last public execution had been carried out in Belfast.
It tells the story of claiming land at all cost, based on the ancient Northern Irish myth on the origin of the iconographic Red Hand of Ulster. The right hand of the executioner is chopped off.
The executioner becomes the executed. The perpetrator is also its own victim through the very act. The blood drenched right hand is then printed on the white middle section of the grey flag -
a flag that never was and never will be, but poses a grey in-between impossibility in the present.
Performance by Keike Twisselmann
Participants: Keike Twisselmann (executioner and executed) and Eoghan McTigue (sound effects)
Artwork Copyright: Keike Twisselmann