An art project featuring a list of the 34,361 refugees and migrants who lost their lives trying to reach Europe has been destroyed in Liverpool.

The list, which the Guardian published as a special supplement in June, was produced for World Refugee Day. It was posted on hoardings outside a building site in Liverpool’s Chinatown as part of the Liverpool Biennial art festival.

On Wednesday the festival tweeted:

We were startled to see the majority of The List removed from Great George Street this Sunday. Did you or anyone you know see something? Do you know why it has been removed?



Help us find out what happened! pic.twitter.com/3yCMoOqFow — Liverpool Biennial (@Biennial) August 1, 2018

Some people suggested a council worker may have mistaken the artwork for illegal flyposters and taken it down, but a spokesman for Liverpool city council said he had checked and was “100% sure” the list had not been removed by anyone employed by the local authority.

The list was posted on the hoardings with the permission of the developers who own the site. They were trying to look at CCTV footage to see if their cameras had caught the culprit, the council spokesman said.

Compiled and updated each year by United for Intercultural Action – an anti-discrimination network of more than 560 organisations across Europe – The List traces information relating to the deaths of 34,361 refugees and migrants who have lost their lives within or on the borders of Europe since 1993.

In collaboration with art workers and institutions, the Istanbul-based artist Banu Cennetoğlu has produced up-to-date and translated versions of The List since 2007 using public spaces such as billboards, transport networks and newspapers.

The Liverpool Biennial said in a statement: “It is timely and important to make The List public during a global refugee crisis. We were dismayed to see it had been removed on Saturday night and would like to know why. The List has been met with critical acclaim and we are doing everything we can to reinstate it.”

Liverpool Biennial is the UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art. Every two years, it commissions international artists to make and present work in the context of Liverpool in public spaces, galleries, museums and online.