How should we remember the pandemic's dead?

September 6, 2020 4:08 PM

A World Memorial to the Pandemic Design firm Gómez Platero (based in Uruguay) offers a plan for one planetary site of memory. (via)

From the GP site:

This public space is a location for reflection. Although its construction stems from the experience of this pandemic, its purpose is to build a collective consciousness that reminds us that mankind is not the center of the ecosystem in which it lives but that we will always be subordinate to nature itself.

posted by doctornemo (26 comments total)

It's a thoughtful design, but it feels weird to be talking about a memorial at this point, like building a monument to the war dead in 1942. We don't know how the story ends yet — how could we be ready to tell it?
posted by saturday_morning at 4:46 PM on September 6, 2020 [14 favorites]

Ya sorry but it would be nice to have a bow on this thing and a little fucking distance between it and us before we get all designy. Sorry but as we approach a million dead with no real end in site in the US I just couldn't be less interested in a global memorial. Maybe that's a typical American centric POV but, while we firmly deserve what we're getting, we are part of the world last I checked and we're e still pretty doomed for a while at least.
posted by chasles at 5:08 PM on September 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

For some reason I've been assuming at some point in the future, when there is a full accounting (or closer than we have now), cities and towns will have their own memorials. Much like you can't drive anywhere without seeing a war memorial.

But that is an assumption on my part that people would want to reflect on this! It was formed before people just started accepting a thousand dead every day to own the libs and increase shareholder value.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 5:18 PM on September 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

How many monuments do we have to the 50 million dead of the Spanish Flu?
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 5:23 PM on September 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

I think the AIDS quilt might be a better precedent than the war monuments of conflicts past are. What we need now, I think, are things that remind us of the humanity and specificity of every person who has died and will die from this thing: something like the Faces of Covid twitter account or the NY Times's Those We've Lost page.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:31 PM on September 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

I feel as if the design firm Gómez Platero was looking to showcase their design abilities.
posted by geoff. at 5:35 PM on September 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

(Perhaps if we'd had a few more Spanish Flu memorials, we'd have taken this pandemic more seriously instead of repeating the playbook page-for-page.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 5:43 PM on September 6, 2020 [21 favorites]

A European response is the Plague Column, like in Vienna.

Fleeing the city, the Habsburg emperor Leopold I vowed to erect a mercy column if the epidemic would end. In the same year [1679], a provisional wooden column made by Johann Frühwirth was inaugurated, showing the Holy Trinity on a Corinthian column together with nine sculpted angels.

posted by Rash at 5:49 PM on September 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

I think a proper memorial in the USA would be a statue of Trump engulfed by plague rats, with nothing visible of his body, except for a single hand clutching an open suitcase spilling out MAGA merchandise.
posted by benzenedream at 6:07 PM on September 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

The plaza surrounding the Trump statue should include the phrase, “It did not have to be like this.”
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:50 PM on September 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Trump could perhaps be a detail at the base of the column, a crimson-handed buffoon among various other "leaders" suffering the torments of the damned. I can't imagine that he merits more than that, either on a national or global scale.

As to the OP, I can't say I personally find the Gómez Platero design very inspiring. But I don't think it's necessarily too early for someone to be thinking about these things.
posted by Not A Thing at 7:51 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Brave martyrs for capitalism and convenience?
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 8:11 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think the best memorial would be a sweeping political and social change that ushers capitalism and fascism into the dustbin of history, Universal UBI, and universal health care.

Too soon?

Too hopeful?
posted by evilDoug at 9:10 PM on September 6, 2020 [10 favorites]

The memorial design looks unsafe. I don't like it at all.
posted by Kitchen Witch at 10:18 PM on September 6, 2020

All memorials serve political purposes in their present moment, and are only nominally about the past. From the pull quote,

Although its construction stems from the experience of this pandemic, its purpose is to build a collective consciousness that reminds us that mankind is not the center of the ecosystem in which it lives but that we will always be subordinate to nature itself.

that sounds like something it would be good to have a reminder of sooner rather than later. Might help ensure some of the less responsible governments take action that could ameliorate future effects of the pandemic, lessening the total death toll and such.
posted by eviemath at 10:44 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Kitchen Witch, I agree. I don't mind the idea of a centralized memorial, but that one looks like it's spreading.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:44 PM on September 6, 2020

Since choosing the location of the memorial would likely spark political jealousies, it could be decided objectively by placing it at the geographical epicenter of pandemic deaths.
posted by fairmettle at 10:47 PM on September 6, 2020

With memorials there's always the question of how they should deal with culpability. The statement for this memorial says "we can remind our visitors -- as the pandemic has -- that we as human beings are subordinate to nature and not the other way around". Which is a valid sentiment. But at the same time I feel bothered by the idea of people gathering around it and feeling things like "we couldn't have stopped it, it was a force of nature" and "how could this ever have happened? Truly humanity is helpless in the face of nature."

This is a pandemic where people are being killed by the people around them, often directly as a result of selfishness, uncaring, or militant ignorance. It's also a pandemic where people are being killed by the hierarchical systems they live in, whose existence relies on looking away from their human cost. It's a human pandemic at least as much as it is a natural one. I feel like a worthy memorial would force people to grapple with that. To think, "Did I play a part?"
posted by trig at 10:50 PM on September 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I think the AIDS quilt might be a better precedent than the war monuments

As we're in the middle of it perhaps we could have a way to design our own square before some of us actually become victims. Might give the anti-maskers pause.
posted by sammyo at 4:56 AM on September 7, 2020

Please come up with something else as opposed to appropriating the hugely significant and specific cultural expression that is the quilt.
The ribbon and “it gets better” have already lost the weight of their symbolism.
posted by J.R. Hartley at 5:36 AM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I wonder how one would curate the Museum of COVID19. Would there be permanent exhibits on the global rise of authoritarianism and nationalism in the early 21st century, the brief history of systemic racism and migration patterns, the role of the internet on society, the vast and rapid advances in scientific collaboration and research, the Mask Wars?

What’s so interesting about this pandemic is how closely it fits to, highlights, and amplifies existing social, cultural, economic, and political realities and trends in our world. Those who have and are dying are those who have already suffered health inequalities; those who are prospering have already reaped wealth and power from horrors, those who are lashing out against mask orders have already been filled with rage and resentment against changing social norms. In a lot of ways, it would really be the Museum of Us at Our Best and Our Worst.
posted by skookumsaurus rex at 5:39 AM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Maybe I’m alone in this opinion but I think the design of this memorial is really beautiful and haunting. But we would really need to build one in every city or town to properly memorialize the scale of the pandemic.

I have been a bit surprised that more homespun memorials haven’t sprung up - the type with photos along fences outside hospitals with flowers and teddy bears. But it feels really hard to have collective mourning for a tragedy that is not in any way over.
posted by mai at 7:21 AM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

photos along fences outside hospitals with flowers and teddy bears

I have a vague recollection of seeing a photo/news article about exactly this sort of memorial somewhere back in April or so? I may be misremembering. Such a memorial wouldn't be created in places where covid deaths are not numerous or frequent enough, but would also be quite hard to maintain where covid deaths are too numerous. Given exponential growth, there's probably only a very short window between the two. (Which relates to how horrifyingly quickly it seems that some folks in the US have gone from not caring about covid because they don't think it's serious, to not caring about covid because they think it's inevitable.)
posted by eviemath at 8:20 AM on September 7, 2020

In Belle Isle, Detroit, they just did something like a fence of photos: Tribute to virus victims.
posted by Rash at 8:33 AM on September 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have an issue with art that claims it has a message. These days, in order to understand the art, you have to read the artist’s statement, because there is nothing inherent in the piece that makes the statement. This monument is one of these.

The Vietnam memorial in Washington DC is profound in so many ways. We need something like that, not some bit of modern architecture with a vague message about something as long as you read the sign at the entrance.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:33 AM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Maybe I am feeling a bit vindictive and out of empathy today, but in this age of digital art and big data engineering I'd love a memorial designed to last a few thousand years.

An endlessly scrolling loop of tweets and FB posts COVID deniers along with their obituaries if they died by COVID, and those of the people they infected.
posted by Dr. Curare at 2:06 PM on September 7, 2020