"In Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederacy, in what was the largest slave-holding state on the eve of the Civil War—crowds joined the mass protests that erupted across the country and beyond following the callous killings of George Floyd and others at the hands of police. 

Protesters focused attention on the Confederate statues lined up along Monument Avenue, covering them with graffiti, and projecting an image of Floyd’s face with the letters “BLM,” for Black Lives Matter, and the slogan “No Justice No Peace” over the monument of Robert E. Lee—the largest on the avenue, a six-story state-owned monument on a state-owned island of land—the first monument to be erected to the Confederate general in the nation, in 1890. Thousands of similar monuments went up in the years that followed. The projected image, created by Dustin Klein and carried widely over social media" 

Read more about Dustin Klein's projection on the Robert E. Lee statue here. 

"Places of Remembrance is a memorial in Berlin-Schoeneberg in a neighborhood called the Bayerische Viertel created in remembrance of Jews living in Germany during the Third Reich. In June 1993, the artists Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock put up 80 brightly printed signs on lampposts."

The signs created by the artists feature bold images coupled with real rules and regulations designed to strip away freedom from Jewish people in Berlin. This artwork is a kind of decentralized memorial as the signs are located throughout the Bayerische Viertel neighborhood.  

Learn more about Places of Remembrance here. 

"A group in New York City has been installing bikes painted white at the sites of accidents where cyclists were killed...

In 2005, a member of the collective witnessed the immediate aftermath of a crash, and thought the group had to do something. 'We all felt it was our responsibility,' Singer said.

The idea of setting up a ghost bike was taken from a project in St. Louis, Missouri. These projects have since spread to over 200 locations around the world, including Austria, New Zealand, Cyprus, and Singapore.

It was jarring and emotional. It was planned as a one-time thing. Then just a week after the first ghost bike was set up, another cyclist was killed on the road, Singer said—and then another."

Learn more here.

The Heidentor, in modern-day Austria - also known as Heathens' Gate or Pagans' Gate - is a partially-reconstructed ruin of a Roman triumphal arch, situated in modern-day Austria.  In an ingenious display, a line diagram of the rest of the structure has been etched onto a sheet of perspex, allowing visitors to stand in front of it and line it up with what still stands in front of them, to appreciate the triumphal arch would have looked in its full glory.

Learn more about the Heidentor and some other examples of innovative virtual reconstruction of monuments here.

Three hypothetical Covid-19 monuments 

America is yet to commemorate its Covid 19 victims in an official monument.  This precedent explores three concepts for a monument put forward by three different artists.

"Unlike a war, a pandemic is invisible and diffuse. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Its death toll is ultimately unknowable. That makes a virus difficult to mark with physical tributes. Few memorials mark the 1918 Spanish flu; one is a modest granite bench built in Vermont two years ago, underwritten by a local restaurant also marking its own centennial. 

The coronavirus pandemic is not over, either. Not even close. A third wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths is lashing the nation from coast to coast. More than 12 million Americans have contracted COVID-19, and more than 250,000 of them have died...

So this might seem like a strange time to imagine memorializing the pandemic in a formal way. A premature time. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was conceived in 1981, six years after the United States had withdrawn from the conflict. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s 9/11 memorial broke ground at the site of the World Trade Center in 2006, almost five years after the attacks.

But there are downsides to waiting... The feelings, facts, and ideas available during a calamity dissipate as it ebbs. The temptation arises to contain tragedy in a tidy box, closing the book on its history.

Rather than await a design competition for a real memorial, we wanted to see, in the brutal heaviness of the moment, how some of the nation’s most exciting designers might memorialize this time. We commissioned three pieces from artists who straddle the lines between art and architecture, design and social justice, technology and manufacturing to speculate on the question What might a COVID-19 memorial be? These are the results." 

Learn more about the 3 visions for a Covid-19 memorial here.