Architecture of Impunity — Billy McCannon

Triangle in the Square · Proposed Public Art · Bogotá 2027

Public Installation · 2027

Triangle in the Square

Triangle of Impunity is a participatory public installation in which three screens form an equilateral triangle in a public square. Working with ten participants over five days across three weeks, the artist facilitates a series of Theatre of the Oppressed games through which the participants generate the material that appears on the screens. The games are not rehearsals — they are the work. A person surrounded by six others forming a moving square, unable to escape no matter which way they turn: that is testimony about impunity. The edit assembles this material into a cyclical, non-narrative piece in which the three screens are in constant dialogue — a close up on one screen plays against a long shot on another, testimony on two screens while hands move on the third. The piece has no beginning and no end, only a duration. Someone passing through the square at any moment receives a complete experience.

The installation is designed to reflect the humour and sensibility of its host community. What emerges in Bogotá will be specific to Bogotá — its wit, its grief, its way of seeing. The project traces a methodology developed over thirty years, from Portlaoise Prison through fieldwork in a Brazilian favela, arriving now in Colombia where the architecture of state violence that Ireland knows from its own history operates with a particular and documented impunity. The triangle holds three territories: Ireland, Colombia, Palestine. Next year in Jerusalem.

Collaborators

Luz Marina Bernal — Theatre artist, Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Founding member of MAFAPO, Mothers of Soacha. Her son Fair Leonardo was killed in the false positives in 2008.

Selene Cruz — Co-creator and producer, Bogotá. People's Congress.

People's Congress — Colombian social movement organisation. Organisational partner for public presentation.

Street level · single figure · night

Exterior view · installation · night

The Practice

Portlaoise Prison
1999–2009

NCAD MA
Participatory Art Practice

I did not go to Portlaoise Prison to make a participatory arts project. I went because I wanted to understand how interrogation shapes a community from the inside — I was writing a screenplay about a woman who carries those wounds. When one of the prisoners proposed a project investigating the same subject from a different point of view, an unimaginable opportunity presented itself.

The men I worked with existed between two walls of enforced silence — the oath of secrecy sworn to the IRA, and the machinery of Special Powers legislation deployed by the state. The discipline that held the landing together made the work possible. The secrecy that governed their lives was not an obstacle — it was the subject.

What became clear immediately was that the IRA's only interest in film was propaganda. They asked if I could help. I told them I thought IRA propaganda was shite. Before I could draw breath the CO of the landing replied, with exasperation, that he felt exactly the same way. I asked him if he had ever seen the Coca-Cola ad about Route 66. His eyes lit up. I said: you can't make that — you don't have the budget. The only thing you can do that isn't propaganda is tell your story, truthfully.

The CO became the producer of the project. He held the tapes. He briefed the men: they could speak about their own experience of arrest and interrogation. They were encouraged to lie if they were inclined to — they were characters in a game. Nothing would be shown without their clearance. No operational matters. The rules of engagement were set by the community's own leadership structure, not imposed from outside.

What was surprising — what nobody predicted — was how the men related to the camera. They used it confessionally. At times surprisingly so. Some used it as a means of confessing transgressions to the landing. The camera became a mirror, a priest, a witness. My role became about creating a space that the men could occupy — a space outside of the secrecy, outside of the landing's rules, outside of the state's reach.

Two years into the project the work was shown at the prison's own exhibition. The response was immediate — both the prison authorities and the IRA staff on the landing withheld permission for any further work of a documentary nature. I enrolled in the NCAD for a Masters in Participatory Art Practice and continued working within the permissions I had. That is what it is to live between walls — to spend your life looking for a space that belongs to you.

The Methodology

Theatre of the Oppressed
adapted for cinematic expression

The work that emerged was not documentary. True Words came from men who could only inch toward the boundary of what was permissible to say. f-slot came from a man who could only speak obliquely, through invented characters on an invented landing. Recoil came from a story told identically by two different prisoners that could never be attributed. The fiction was the alibi for the truth.

The Theatre of the Oppressed games are not warm-up exercises or therapeutic tools. They are structured dramatic forms, each defined by its own rules, each generating its own arc — a beginning, a development, a climax, a resolution. The rules of the game create the structure of the work. The game gives participants a form to inhabit, a set of rules to play within, a structure that carries them toward something they could not have arrived at through direct testimony or conventional interview.

The game is the alibi for the truth. Exactly as fiction was the alibi for documentary in the Portlaoise work.

The installation Walls Behind Walls was a solution to a problem. The films made inside Portlaoise had their own points of view — the prisoners' points of view — and a single screen would have imposed my authorship on material that was not mine to author. Placing them on three screens in a crescent, image on both sides of each screen — required the viewer to move physically to change their point of view. No two viewings were the same. The form was not chosen. It was arrived at.

Portlaoise Works · 1999–2009

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Installation · Short Version

Walls Behind Walls

2005 · NCAD MA Exhibition

The resolution of a decade of video work inside Portlaoise Prison. Three screens in a crescent, image on both sides, the viewer required to move to change their point of view.

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Participatory · Installation

True Words

2005

Men on a republican landing exploring the boundary between what can be said and what cannot.

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Participatory · Installation

f-slot

2005

A man who could only speak obliquely, through invented characters on an invented landing. Fiction as the alibi for truth.

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Drama · Short Film

Recoil

2006 · RTE/IFB Short Cuts

A story told identically by two different prisoners that could never be attributed. Best Irish Short, Galway Film Fleadh.

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Participatory · Documentary

Gatefever

2005

Shot over six weeks of temporary release with Pascal Burke. As he prepares for freedom he recalls the Birmingham Bombing of 1974.

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Participatory · Documentary

Cell 26

2024

A recent return to Portlaoise. The methodology — participant ownership, consent at every stage, the game as alibi for truth — applied twenty years on.

Development

Amulet Studios
Ireland & Colombia
2009–present

The Portlaoise work established the methodology. What followed was its application — and its limits. In Ireland, work about republican prisoners, about state violence, about the long conflict arrived inside a frame so contested, so politically charged, so locally inflected that it could not breathe. The barrier was not the quality of the work. It was context.

Any representation of IRA prisoners as human beings — playing, exploring their own interiority, finding a space that belonged to them — violated a narrative that both the state and the media required to be maintained. The games were the most subversive thing imaginable. Not because they produced political content but because they produced humanity.

The connection to Colombia began through documentary work. Filming in Bogotá for Everybody Knows, shooting street performers and activists using circus arts, clowning and fire performance as tools of political resistance — the methodology encountered a community living through an identical architecture of state violence with entirely different cultural materials. The recognition was immediate.

Making work in Colombia changes the Irish frame. It establishes that the methodology is not an Irish or a republican or a partisan thing. It is a methodology that has been used with a community whose suffering is internationally recognised, legally documented, and morally unambiguous. When you bring that methodology back to Ireland, it arrives with a different authority. The methodology that comes back from Colombia is not the same one that left Ireland. That is the benefit to Irish art.

Community Works · Ireland & Colombia

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Participatory · Community Documentary

Twinbrook

2018

Community members paint a mural commemorating Carol Anne Kelly, killed by a British Army plastic bullet aged twelve on 22 May 1981.

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Community Documentary · Belfast

Mount Vernon

North Belfast

Belfast mural documentation — loyalist estate, north Belfast. Community murals across sectarian divides as acts of persistent public memory.

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Feature Documentary · 2026

Everybody Knows

Post-production · Architecture of Impunity series

Following UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the film traces how activists across four countries recognise a shared architecture of state violence.

View the film →