What would a memorial to One Million People Look Like?

Just two weeks ago the U.S. reached one million deaths from Covid-19.

You might’ve shrugged off this news, since one million deaths feels too big to comprehend. I understood its magnitude when I heard a reporter on NPR say “One million deaths is far more than the number of people who have died from AIDS in the U.S.” since the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

It's impossible not to be affected by all the losses we’ve experienced over the last 2.5 years, even if you haven’t lost someone to death from Covid. I wonder: How do we memorialize one million people? How would a memorial to a former way-of-life look? How do we honor the dead, remember, heal, and move forward?

Markers and memorials give us a place to locate our grief. Being Jewish, we put a stone on the grave of our loved one when we visit—a symbol that although life is fragile, memory endures.

The underpinning of my work has always been the concept of The Memorial. Every artwork I have made is ultimately a monument or memorial, and I often think about the ways in which we remember.

The French artist Christian Boltanski, in an interview in 1992 expressed his ideas about creating memorials. He said “If you make a monument in stone, everyone will soon forget what you have commemorated. The city will pay for the monument in order to forget it. What I wanted to do was to make a monument that would have to be remade each month, using very fragile materials…Of course, the monument would fall down and have to be continually reconstructed. If at any time it disappeared, it would mean that times had changed, and the reasons for its existence were forgotten. The only possible monuments are those that must be continually re-made, that require a continuous engagement, so that people will remember.”  

Those who have lost loved ones—to violent acts or slow illness—know that it is impossible to forget, and the memory gets rebuilt in the mind over and over again. If you’re like me, the rebuilding takes the form of artwork that gets constructed, deconstructed and remade again.

What are the ways in which you remember?