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has died of COVID, accompanied by a memorial wall with each person’s name. The architecture firm Gómez Platero has unveiled a design for a “World Memorial to the Pandemic” to be built on the coast of Uruguay, which would aim to be a universal site of mourning and reflection. WaterFire’s Beacon of Hope was a spontaneous solution to the question of how to mourn the growing number of virus-related deaths in Rhode Island. “We felt at the time that it was critically important that we created a way for people to grieve or celebrate life lost because you couldn’t go to funeral homes, you couldn’t go to memorial services,” Peter Mello, managing director and co-CEO of WaterFire, told the College Hill Independent. Initially, one could not visit the Beacon of Hope in person either. Footage of the installation was live streamed 24/7, allowing for home viewing. Only later, as state restrictions changed, did WaterFire open the physical site to visitors. Barnaby Evans, WaterFire’s founder and executive artistic director, led the nightly lighting ceremonies. Evans, sometimes accompanied by others, would bring out a new set of luminaria, light their internal candles, and place them amidst the other lanterns, which were already lit and arranged in neat rows on the floor of the Arts Center’s main hall. As expansive as the display became, its project of memorializing each life lost to COVID in Rhode Island remains forever incomplete: the number of virus-related deaths in the state has more than doubled since the installation’s removal. Watching recordings of the Beacon now is sobering not only because of the hundreds of deaths that it sought to represent, but also for the hundreds more that it never got to. +++ Memorials function visually, inviting specific comprehensions of tragedy through the particular visual experiences that they create for viewers. What the Beacon of Hope foregrounds about the pandemic is predicated on its visuality, which works primarily in two interlocking ways: there is the dense, vast spread of lanterns, which registers the profound scale of loss resulting from COVID in Rhode Island, coupled with the image of each lantern as a discrete symbol for each individual life. With this latter aspect of its design, the Beacon of Hope reflects a desire, accompanying many pandemic memorial projects, to counteract the perceived impersonality of daily death statistics. As America’s death toll from COVID neared 100,000 last May, the New York Times published a front page filled entirely with names and brief descriptions of victims, with a headline declaring the loss “incalculable.” Like WaterFire’s Beacon, this display attempted to clearly articulate that people lie at the heart of each newly reported number, people whose lives were cut needlessly short. Perhaps these reckonings with statistics in part represent an effort to compensate for the self-interestedness with which
we often read the numbers; the way we register COVID death counts in terms of what they mean for our own lives—are things going to get better for me? worse?—rather than for the dead and their survivors. With a candle for each Rhode Islander lost to the virus, the Beacon of Hope implies the grievability of every death and calls for mourning for each. As governments continue to make pandemic policy decisions that jeopardize lives—particularly lives that were already vulnerable—capacious grief for those who have died of COVID is vital. Memorials like the Beacon may help build grief into local and national narratives of the Coronavirus, guiding us toward responses to the pandemic that privilege the preservation of life. Still, like a statistic, a memorial places its own abstractions on tragedy. Seeking to encapsulate complex moments, memorials condense varying lived experiences into a single site or image, and so they can give the impression that they reflect a society’s shared memory of the memorialized event. Rarely does a large-scale event itself produce collective memory; it is memorials, along with other forms of history-making, that do so. Situated in and as common space, a memorial may seem as if it simply represents a common past rather than creates one, and in this way, it can obscure certain real memories that do not appear in its projected narrative. Attention must be given to this risk and to the question of which narratives are given power as we continue to memorialize the pandemic because there never has been one collective experience of COVID. Marginalized communities have suffered a disproportionate share of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, a product of both state mismanagement and existing structures of disadvantage. As is often the case with memorials, the Beacon of Hope represented one institution speaking for a broad range of experiences. While the Beacon was simple enough to avoid obscuring any particular experience of the pandemic, there are ways that memorials can attend to the specificity of the losses they represent. Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, in which each panel is woven by survivors of the dead, memorial projects can invite public participation. The closest that the Beacon came to such a feature was a transactional one: those who donated to WaterFire could write a message to be displayed on the Beacon’s webpage and get a star for a loved one hung above the installation. As the Beacon was an early response to the pandemic created under the constrictions of lockdown, generosity is due to it and other first attempts at reconciling with this disaster. A task for future COVID memorials—on the level of country, state, or town—will be acknowledging the pandemic as the fractured, disjointed tragedy that it is. As these memorials become part of public space, potentially informing the way we and our descendents will understand the pandemic, attention must be given to ensuring that these sites do not crystallize singular narratives suiting individuals in power under whose purview public memorialization often falls.
+++ WaterFire is currently planning to create a permanent memorial for COVID victims. Mello told the Indy that the organization is considering planting a tree on its grounds. This permanent marker for the pandemic would add to a geography of memorials spread across Providence, particularly concentrated around the downtown section of the Providence River. At the bottom of College Street, Memorial Park houses several monuments to 20th century tragedies—the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, the Korean War—and nearly just across the river are memorials for Rhode Islanders killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and for the victims of Ireland’s Great Famine. During the festival for which WaterFire is best known, Memorial Park becomes occupied by the nighttime revelries. When I first attended WaterFire, I stumbled among the monuments in the park without recognizing what they were, distracted as I was by costumed statue imitators and all the glitzy lights that the festival deposits upon Providence’s waters and streets. The hope embedded in permanent memorials like those of Memorial Park—the hope that, long after the people who knew the deceased have passed, these objects can help preserve the memory of tragedies—is a tenuous one. Even after we discover their meaning, memorials can settle into the scenery of our daily lives, becoming mute and forgettable. Naturally, memorials to the COVID pandemic have just as uncertain of a fate. Yet, this does not have to be a reason to abandon the project of memorialization altogether. In the wake of trauma, communities need places to gather and mourn. When designed thoughtfully with an eye toward stories most at risk of obfuscation, memorials can bear meaningfully upon the future. They can help make grief a precondition for confronting both tragedies of the past and those to come. ALEX VALENTI B’22.5 takes a moment of pause as he walks along the Providence River.
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