'Sow's Honor' by Kat Schneider at King's Leap, New York

In 1386, the tribunal of Falaise sentenced a sow to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and the arms of a child thus causing its death. As if to make the travesty of justice complete, the sow was dressed in man’s clothes and executed on the public square near the city-hall at an expense of ten sous and ten deniers, besides a pair of gloves to the hangman. The executioner was provided with new gloves in order that he might come from the discharge of his duty, metaphorically at least, with clean hands, thus indicating that, as a minister of justice, he incurred no guilt in shedding blood.1

The sow’s ordeal was memorialized in the form of a large fresco on the southwest wall of the Sainte-Trinité de Falaise Church. However, a nineteenth century renovation of the church resulted in the wall being whitewashed, and the fresco along with it. In the absence of copies, both the visual representation of the execution and the event itself were erased from public memory.

In the dynamics of trial and ordeal, the offender’s body must be transformed into an image in order to be seen, and therefore, punished.2 This body must be rendered as sensuous —- wherein the pain is palpable — yet also ​ungestalt — ​formless, in a way which incites horror and obscures recognition.

Punishment is our preferred purification strategy. Subsisting largely on female flesh3, we hoard means to reclaim control. Animal trials are financed by human desires. The verdict is the body inverted; nature hangs in the balance. Justice is served and you’re on the menu.

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1 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals . 140-141 2 Terry-Fritch, Allie. “Animal Trials, Humiliation Rituals, and the Sensuous Suffering of Criminal Offenders in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, Ed., Heather Graham and Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank. Boston: Brill, 2018. 53-84. 3 Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat - 25th Anniversary Edition . New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 256.