Covid 19 Memorial

The Atlantic invited us to think about how we might approach the design of a COVID-19 Memorial. Copper is an anti-microbial metal, and viruses do not survive on its surface for very long. However, it collects human scent very well. That “metallic” smell is actually body odors. However, it is those odors, or chemosignals, that we transmit to one another when we shake hands, embrace, or come close enough to each other that humans, and other animals, are communicating to each other in these complex chemical ways that we have yet to understand fully. So perhaps a memorial invites touch, activates are sense of smell, and communicates to us something deeper than we can fully comprehend. Touching is complex, rendered even more so during these complex times. A memorial that asks us to remember this moment, and those who survived, perhaps lacking touch, and those who didn’t, who we can no longer touch, demands a material that that entices our memory senses and has the capacity to ameliorate the effects of future pandemics.

But rather than a memorial as a destination, it could be distributed. But how do you distribute a copper object to everyone on Earth? The logistics seem impossible. They also correspond exactly with the coordination needed to distribute a vaccine that would successfully inoculate the planet’s population. Perhaps the cure could come with the token that might preserve its own memory, like a talisman or a thing that you could touch all around the world, in every city or town, given that each one will have been touched by the pandemic. It could be something as simple as a doorknob or a balustrade—something mundane—something anyone would touch and recall this moment. Could the vessel that delivers the vaccine itself become the memorial? It’s the one thing that would touch everybody but not touch anyone else.