London unveils stunning artwork commemorating trans victims of violence

A recently unveiled artwork in London’s Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth portrays a large cube consisting of plaster faces of hundreds of trans people that’ll eventually be washed away over the next 18 months due to rain and wind.

The artwork, made by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, is called “Mil Veces un Instante” (“A Thousand Times in an Instant”). It was unveiled on Wednesday to a large crowd, many of whom were from Margolles’ trans community back in Mexico.

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The artwork is a 3.3-metric-ton (3.6 U.S. ton) cube covered in face masks of 726 trans and gender-nonconforming people from the UK and Mexico. It’s meant to be a Tzompantli, a type of rack used predominantly in some Mesoamerican civilizations up to around 1200 CE. In their original usage, they displayed the heads of captives of war or those who were sacrificed.

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This imagery was evoked in tribute to a friend of Margolles, Karla La Borrada, a 67-year-old trans woman who was a singer and sex worker. She was murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in 2015. Her case remains unsolved.

“We pay this tribute to her and to all the other people who were killed for reasons of hate,” Margolles said in a statement. “But, above all, to those who live on, to the new generations who will defend the power to freely choose to live with dignity.”

“This collective sculpture… stands not only as a display of resilience and humanity from the trans plus/non-binary community but also as a reminder of the murders and disappearances that still occur in Latin America,” she continued.

The work is meant to “naturally age” as time goes on, gradually decomposing the faces in the weather.

The Fourth Plinth is a stand erected in the 1800s for a never-completed statue. Since 1999, it has been used to host various artworks that will be filtered in and out over an 18-month period. The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan funds it with additional backing from the Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Artists receive a £30,000 ($39,400) fee and a further £140,000 ($155,631) to cover the costs of creating their works.

Previous works of art depicted at the Fourth Plinth included a drone plane and a giant fly, 2,400 members of the public on a rotating schedule, and a giant bronze thumb.

Tabby Lamb, who participated as one of the faces in the project, said, “At a time when the trans community is more under attack than ever, it feels radical to be part of a sculpture celebrating not only our existence but also our vast diversity.”

Ekow Eshun, the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group chair, told The Art Newspaper that the work evokes “the world we want to live in,” adding, “It is fitting that we have contemporary art that speaks to our times.”When asked to elaborate, he said this piece represents “connection and humans.”

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