Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth will tell the stories of trans and gender variant people through a new art installation featuring 726 face masks. Created by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles , 63, the plaster cast masks come with unique names and features and are intended to slowly deteriorate with the elements over the next two years. Ms Margolles said she wanted to highlight a community that typically tries to blend in with the larger cisgender population through subtle features such as the inclusion of lipstick and, in one instance, half an eyebrow.
“We are giving faces to them all,” she said of the work, which was also designed to be a collective artistic hug for murdered trans singer and retired sex worker Karla La Borrada, who lost her life at the age of 67 in 2016. The subject of death is of key importance to Ms Margolles’s work, which has previously made use of bodily fluids from a deceased person. Ms Margolles is herself a former forensic pathologist.
She decided to use her interest in the subject to honour Ms La Borrada, with whom she struck up a friendship while working on a photographic project. “Instead of doing one piece in her memory, I wanted to do something to represent the whole trans community – a collective piece about that community hugging her,” the artist told The Guardian . “Karla was the pillar of the community.
And on 22 December 2015, she was murdered,” she added. Nobody was ever charged with the murder. Featuring masks cast from li.