A sobering celebration took place in London’s Trafalgar Square on Wednesday 18 September, as Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ latest commission Fourth Plinth was unveiled. “Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)” (2024), composed of plaster casts, sheds light on violence against transgender and non-binary people in both Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Margolles’ installation consists of an 8-foot-tall rectangular prism lined with 726 cast faces of trans and non-binary people from across Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez, and London. The work bears a striking resemblance to a Mesoamerican tzompantli – a publicly displayed skull rack consisting of the skulls of war prisoners or those killed for Mayan, Aztec or Toltec human sacrifice rituals. The artist originally trained as a forensic pathologist and worked as a funeral director in Mexico City, influencing her multidisciplinary practice to focus primarily on death, societal violence and the consequences of social and economic vulnerability in Central and South America.
From soapy water used to wash the bodies of murder victims to residual blood from crime scenes, Margolles regularly incorporates human remains and byproducts of post-mortem examination into her work in a macabre, urgent confrontation of human availability and trauma caused by narco-violence and border violence in Mexico. For ‘Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)’, the artist specifically commemorates her late friend Karla La Borrada, a trans woman, singer, activist and retired sex worker whose murder was allegedly committed in 2015 in Ciudad Juárez. remains a cold case.
“We pay this tribute [Karla] and to all the other people who have been killed for reasons of hatred,” the artist said in a statement explaining this the committee is a monument of resilience. “But above all to those who live on, to the new generations who will defend the power to freely choose a life of dignity. Through this structure there is a return to the human, the original, the sacred.”
In addition to community groups in Mexico, Margolles worked closely with British-based LGBTQ+ advocacy groups such as Micro Rainbow and Queercircle as she facilitated the months-long project. Because the patch was applied directly to the participants’ faces, each cast retained facial oils, skin cells, hair and even makeup, a fitting continuation of the artist’s practice of humanizing her work by incorporating biological essences. Exposure to London’s climate will cause the depicted faces to lose their shape and clarity as the plasterwork deteriorates over the 18-month exhibition.
“Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)” is the 15th commission to grace the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square over the past 25 years, following installations by artists such as Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread, Hans Haacke, Yinka Shonibare, Michael Rakowitz , David Shrigley and, most recently, Samson Kambalu. Commissions for the empty plinth, which was initially built in the 1840s to house a statue of King William IV, were initiated in 1998 through the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. In 2003, the committee’s oversight was assigned to the Mayor of London.
A Fourth Plinth commission by Tschabalala Self is scheduled for 2026.
