METRO
QUIET FIRES
TEXT ALEX VALENTI
DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN
ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER
Memorializing COVID in Rhode Island
13
Last April, the arts organization WaterFire Providence set up the Beacon of Hope, a memorial for Rhode Islanders lost to COVID. At the organization’s Arts Center in Providence’s Valley neighborhood, the WaterFire team set up a faux-fire brazier— resembling those which light Providence’s rivers for WaterFire’s popular downtown festival—surrounded by a field of luminaria, one paper lantern for each COVID-related death in Rhode Island. During a lighting ceremony each night, new luminaria were added to the installation to account for the new deaths reported by the Rhode Island Department of Health that day. When the Beacon was taken down in July, it included slightly over 1,000 lanterns. One of many sites across the country created to memorialize the ongoing pandemic, the Beacon of Hope remains the most prominent public memorial to Covid deaths in Rhode Island. WaterFire’s installation also exists within the larger, historical tradition of memorial-building in response to tragedy, reflecting many of the methods and aims of its forebears. Memorials tend to operate with a double function. Their more immediate role is to serve as a centralized location for mourning and honoring the dead, and in doing so, they provide a sense of healing for a community or nation reckoning with trauma. The second, longer-term function is to mark the event with an enduring public fixture: to stave off future amnesia about the past by fostering a collective, shared memory of tragedy. Temporary memorials like WaterFire’s Beacon—assembled in the direct
aftermath of tragedy—prioritize the first function, yet they serve as markers too, calling on publics to contend more intimately with unfathomable loss than the news may allow. Memorials can shape a community’s narrative of events, framing them as tragedies by their very presence. Adapting traditional means of memorialization to the conditions of the pandemic, the Beacon of Hope was entangled both in the knots always following from the work of condensing a multifaceted tragedy into a single site and in the specific dilemmas that COVID presents for memorial projects. The sense of collective memory propagated by memorials often does not correspond to actual collective experience, and so memorializing the pandemic—the harms from which are unevenly distributed across lines of privilege and position— means encountering this tension. +++ Alongside signs voicing support for healthcare and other essential workers, individuals and communities have been setting up impromptu displays of mourning for the pandemic’s mounting casualties since the earliest months of lockdown. Additionally, though the virus continues to exact a devastating global toll each day, numerous governments and organizations have already built or are planning permanent Covid memorials. In Jersey City, a former toxic waste site is being converted into a public park in which trees will be planted for every Jersey City resident who
