On April 26, the arraignment of Luigi Mangione turned the Manhattan courthouse steps into a stage: protest, spectacle and public curiosity converged. Masked faces and “FREE LUIGI” chants made assembly itself a speech act. Chelsea Manning’s brief passage through the crowd sharpened the friction between swift courtroom procedure and the public gaze, a reminder that visibility is administered, not neutral. The images track anxiety, curiosity and collective feeling in posture and grouping — a mediated kind of collective effervescence.

Not all attention was celebratory. Scott LoBaido arrived with a skeleton in a mock electric chair topped by a green Luigi hat, a counter-image that frames the scene through sacrificial myth and scapegoating. Luigi reads at once as enigma, hero, villain and martyr — an empty signifier whose meaning shifts with each glance and chant. Supporters, critics, death penalty opponents and tourists jostled the barricades, forming overlapping publics and counterpublics. Props, chants and costumes turn civic ritual into theater, where scripting, staging and audience co-produce legitimacy — yet the images avoid caricature.

The work keeps contradictions in play: Luigi as fantasy and reality, Mangione as young man and public figure, justice as procedure and spectacle. The courthouse figures as the Law’s stage, while the crowd orbits a shifting object of desire. Effigy and cosplay unsettle the “distribution of the sensible,” exposing both formal legality and its carnivalesque underside. Arraignment becomes liminal time, when roles loosen and renegotiate. What reads as noise is a patterned struggle over interpellation — the hail “Free Luigi!” and its rebuttal. The courthouse is not neutral; it is where moral debate, political theater and collective imagination meet, and where ideology appears as lived fantasy in public.