For 40 days, an artist known as 742 has painted on a long stretch of concrete wall the birth and death dates of those born after World War I who were affected by military and political conflicts between 1924 and 2024. These are nameless dates, each representing thousands of lives. This man-made memorial is entitled “100 Years in the Shadow of War. The Poetry of Numbers”. The artwork is located on a tourist trail between two historically significant former artillery forts on the Thames Riverbank, Tilbury Fort and Coalhouse Fort.
Although nearly 100 years have passed since the end of World War I, the world hoped such events would not recur. In the last 100 years, there has not been a single year on our planet without military conflict. Yet, as if in a chain reaction, time and again, humans have been slaughtered in various parts of the world.
The situation of this artwork has a particular frisson. Tilbury Fort protected the coastal approach to London from the 16th century until World War II. Coalhouse Fort was built to protect against a later threat and similarly decommissioned after the Second World War.
Tilbury Fort has remained largely unchanged since its reconstruction at the end of the 17th century and now houses a museum. Coalhouse Fort was decommissioned in 1949 and is currently closed to visitors, with a public park established in its vicinity.
The artist 742 explained the project as follows: “Time is measured in years, centuries, millennia. In numerology, the number 100 symbolizes the beginning and the end of a cycle. For the ancient Egyptians, the hieroglyph for the number 100 was depicted as a rope twisting into a spiral. History often repeats itself. Tears and sorrow, fear, hunger remain constant in every age. Torture marks on the body heal as slowly as they did thousands of years ago. It’s as if cruelty and stupidity follow humanity like a shadow. In the numbers I paint, shattered lives, persecution, resistance, the struggle for freedom and rights; all human experience is represented. They contain the stories of those who did not want to take up arms and those who had to. Those who left this world seeing that it had not changed, that violence continues, and there is no guarantee that a new war will not start.
By working with numbers, 742 translates a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space, giving the work a temporal dimension. Intentionally deviating from the conventional representation of a memorial, the dates are arranged chaotically. They intersect, connect, and overlap. This dynamic makes them resemble human lives. Numbers, as proto-text, are universal and understood by speakers of all languages. Through this artistic technique, they transform into a system of alternating symbols and resonances. At the centre of the mural, dates merge and these overlaps form a white line, the unfurled loop of the rope symbolizing a hundred years. It mirrors the horizon on the opposite bank, once again reminding us of the cyclical nature of historical events.
