A sobering celebration unfolded in London’s Trafalgar Square on Wednesday, September 18, when the latest Fourth Plinth commission by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles was unveiled. Comprised of plaster face casts, “Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)” (2024) shines a light on violence against transgender and nonbinary people in both Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Margolles’s installation consists of an eight-foot-tall (2.4 meters) rectangular prism lined with 726 cast faces of trans and nonbinary people from across Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez, and London. The work bears a striking resemblance to a Mesoamerican tzompantli — a publicly displayed skull rack made up of the craniums of either war captives or those killed for Maya, Aztec, or Toltec human sacrifice rituals. The artist originally trained as a forensic pathologist and worked as a mortician in Mexico City, influencing her multi-disciplinary practice to primarily center 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 frequently incorporates human remains and postmortem examination byproducts in her work in a macabre, urgent confrontation of human disposability and trauma induced by narcoviolence and border brutality in Mexico. For “Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant),” the artist specifically memorializes her late friend Karla La Borrada, a trans woman, singer, activist, and retired sex worker whose 2015 murder in Ciudad Juárez reportedly remains a cold case.
“We pay this tribute to [Karla] and to all the other people who were killed for reasons of hate,” the artist said in a statement, explaining that the commission is a monument to resilience. “But, above all, to those who live on, to the new generations who will defend the power to freely choose to live with dignity. Through this structure, there is a return to the human, the primal, the sacred.”
Alongside community groups in Mexico, Margolles worked closely with UK-based LGBTQ+ advocacy groups such as Micro Rainbow and Queercircle while facilitating the months-long project. As the plaster was applied directly to participants’ faces, each cast retained facial oils, skin cells, hairs, and even makeup, a fitting continuation of the artist’s practice of humanizing her work by incorporating biological essences. With exposure to London’s climate, the featured faces will lose their shape and clarity as the plaster deteriorates over the duration of the 18-month display.
“Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)” is the 15th commission to grace Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth over the last 25 years, following installations by artists including 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 hold 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 commission oversight was assigned to the Mayor of London.
A Fourth Plinth commission by Tschabalala Self is slated for 2026.
