The Fourth Plinth Is About to Become a Trans Monument

Teresa Margolles’ commission for the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square, Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), is a kind of anti-monument. Born of grief rather than glory, it is a tribute to the trans and non-binary community in Margolles’s native Mexico, a statement against transmisogyny and transfemicide. From September, white plaster casts, like death masks but made from the faces of 726 living trans people in Mexico and the UK will be arranged on the plinth.

The work draws on Margolles’ life before she became an artist when she worked as a forensic pathologist. Sadly, it’s fitting that her fourth plinth installation should refer to traditional death masks: Mexico has the second highest murder rate for trans and gender-diverse people in Latin America, with more than 50 killed every year since 2016. Margolles, a cisgender woman, “first saw trans women in morgues”, not as living people. “Their fingernails were destroyed as they fought for their lives,” she told me.

I met Margolles at Queercircle in North Greenwich – an LGBTQ+ charity that supports artists, and which has hosted her while she worked on the project in London. “When I got the commission [from the fourth plinth commissioning group], the first thing I thought was to make a tribute to my friend Karla,” said Margolles. “Karla was the first trans woman I ever met – an actress, folk singer and sex worker. She introduced me to the trans community in Ciudad Juárez, where I’d been living, on the US border.” Karla was killed on 22 December 2015, aged 64. Nobody has ever been charged with her murder, and no suspects were ever identified. “The police did a light investigation and quickly closed the case,” Margolles said. “She was killed with impunity – no one even found her body until days later. I promised myself that I would honour Karla through art because the society and justice system did nothing for her.”

When Karla was alive, Margolles worked with her on a photo series called Pistas de Baile (Dancefloors), about the bars and cabarets where she and other trans women worked – and which the Mexican government began to destroy as they gentrified the area from the 1990s onwards. “That pushed the community onto the streets, putting them at more risk,” says Margolles. “That was one reason why Karla got killed.” Karla reached out to former colleagues, arranging to take photos of them on the former foundation stones of the nightclubs where they once worked. Karla died before the photos could be exhibited. Instead, nine colour portraits were shown at the Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zürich, which was hosting the Manifesta 11 art fair, in September-October 2016. Karla’s would have been the tenth: Margolles made a black-and-white portrait of Karla central to her exhibition at a disused hotel in Zürich, turning the space into a memorial with blood-red floors and walls. Margolles also included a copy of Karla’s death certificate. “It says she was brutally murdered. She was killed as a woman but buried as a man, under her deadname. Karla was killed with a stone so we exhibited a stone from the area, asking what it means to stone someone.”

Margolles was approached about the fourth plinth in 2018, when she was still grieving Karla. “I wanted to do something like tzompantli [the Mesoamerican racks used to display human skulls] – a stone wall with skull shapes, made as an offering to the gods. This could be a tribute to life, friendship, solidarity and resistance. Karla is dead – she wasn’t the first and sadly won’t be the last – but the community is alive. The work will stand as a witness to the changes for that community in Mexico and the UK over the next two years. The weather will affect the material, but so might its interaction with society.”

Margolles (and I, separately) attended the recent Trans Pride march in London – the largest such event to date. “I saw the amount of people, with their banners demanding things,” she said. “It was beautiful – so much understanding and friendship.” I agreed, pointing out that although rates of transphobia and transfemicide in the United Kingdom do not compare to those in Mexico – a monitoring project recorded just one in 2023 – the UK remains a transphobic society, or at least a deeply transphobic state: one of the first acts of the recently-elected Labour government was to prevent trans youths from accessing puberty blockers. Margolles’ own work has already been igniting trans panic: in February, nearly three years after Mil Veces Un Instante was commissioned, GB News published an article attacking Margolles’s “woke” sculpture and claiming – falsely – that London mayor Sadiq Khan had approved it for the fourth plinth after apparently blocking a memorial to the late Queen. “People got angry because taxpayers’ money is going to a tribute to a sex worker,” Margolles told me. “The work is not just about Karla – it’s about the whole trans community. We’ve only cast three people who openly said they were doing sex work. We’ve had students, professionals, activists, artists, truck drivers – the lot.”

The process of finding 726 models in two countries was complex. In London, Margolles worked with Queercircle and another LGBTQI+ charity, Micro Rainbow, to find people through callouts. In Mexico City, it helped that Margolles had already worked for several years with a shelter run by a trans woman, offering talks and seminars to help the shelter fundraise. Margolles explained the fourth plinth project to visitors to the shelter, who in turn helped her to find more people.

Once Margolles had identified potential models, getting them into the studio was a job in itself. While people in London were more willing, in Mexico City Margolles had to call people to convince them it was safe. Her Mexico studio had two rooms – one for work, the other “more like a living room where people could chat, eat and relax”. Working around the clock, she offered models breakfast, lunch and dinner, putting together playlists of people’s favourite music and even letting models sleep in the studio if it was too late for them to go home safely, or if they had nowhere else to go. “There was an interesting dynamic,” says Margolles, “with different generations and professions talking, who wouldn’t normally meet.”

Margolles took every one of the 726 casts herself. “I spoke to everyone – when they told me about their lives.” It was difficult at first because the [clay modelling] technique wasn’t perfect,” she told me. “I wanted a material that was fragile, but also strong and hard, like the trans community.” She decided to “make a positive out of the fragility” of the moulds, building not just their decay but also their tendency to pick up other materials into the work. “A little piece of everyone is in each cast,” she said. “Oil, eyebrows, hair – tears, maybe. You’re really present.”

Sadly, I met Margolles too late to get my face cast for the project, but I’m excited to have it as part of my (adopted) home city for the next two years. Although there are plans afoot to replace the National Trans Monument tree in Manchester, irrevocably damaged by fire in 2022, there is not, as far as I know, any public monument to any openly trans person, living or dead, nor any memorial for the community as a whole, in the United Kingdom at present. Margolles’ Mil Veces un Instante changes that, temporarily, and its reception during this time of relentless media and political pressure on trans people may determine whether there is anything more, and if there is anything more permanent, in the foreseeable future.

Correction 4/09/24: Margolles’ work was incorrectly called 850 Improntas in an earlier version of this article. It has been updated to use the correct name, Mil Veces un Instante. 

Correction 10/09/24: A previous version of this article said that Margolles had cast 850 trans people’s faces. In fact, it was 726 people.