Plinth-top tribute to murdered journalists
A UNION member who won a place on the plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square used the opportunity to pay public tribute to journalists who have been killed for doing their jobs.
Cheltenham freelance Sharon Wheeler entered the draw to take part in artist Antony Gormley’s One and Another project, in which 2,400 individuals got to spend an hour on the empty podium.
“It was one of those brief moments of madness where you hit ‘send’ on your computer and forget all about it,” she says, “until you get an email a couple of months on congratulating you on being one of the lucky ones chosen from more than 33,500 applicants.”
Hers was not a well-publicised participation, mainly because it was from 1 to 2am, and towards the end of the project in September.
Sharon Wheeler says: “After three weeks of having increasingly eccentric ideas of how to spend the time, I decided to focus on two things.
“One, sparked by a piece in the Journalist earlier this year, was to highlight the number of journalists killed worldwide while doing their jobs.
“The second was to produce as much copy as possible from the hour.”
She contacted the International Federation of Journalists in Brussels who gave her particulars of the 109 journalists who died in 2008 and the 50 so far this year.
When the time came — and “steadfastly not looking down, because I am scared of heights” — she placed 50 small disks, each bearing the name and nation of a dead journalist, on the plinth, and read out a short citation for each.
Then she sat down with her laptop and wrote a feature and an entry for her weekly blog. “And there were no phones or emails to disturb me,” she says.