The Sick Times
“Refusing Imposed Endings”: An interview with Alec Finlay on Scotland’s Covid Memorial
It was one of those soft gray days of spring 2022 when the Covid memorial first opened. Bright but not sunny, overcast but not miserable, the wind blowing blossoms amidst the avenues of trees. People lined up in Glasgow’s Pollok Country Park to walk, remember and grieve together. They wandered holding flowers, talking softly, and inspecting the oak artworks designed by Alec Finlay that act as a form of remembrance for this unprecedented time.
Alec Finlay is a Scottish poet and artist whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. He’s lived with Long Covid since March 2020, and recently completed the memorial in Pollok County Park, called I remember: Scotland’s Covid Memorial. This collective memorial of the COVID-19 pandemic, permanently installed in the public park, is an artwork featuring oak ‘supports’ holding up trees.
In addition to the outdoor art, the memorial includes a book, audio, and web project, which adopts the American artist Joe Brainard’s well-loved form, ‘I remember …’, collages of fragmented recollections and thoughts that all begin with these two words. Single sentences scattered throughout the memorial recall lost loved ones and many aspects of the pandemic, from lockdown to Long Covid. A blend of loss, pathos, grief, fury, and wry humor, this memorial is one of the first collective texts that speaks to the complexity and burden of the ongoing pandemic.
Kat Hill: Why is memory and memorial so important after the trauma of an event like COVID-19? Or to put it another way, what does the work of memory effect?
Alec Finlay: Yesterday I received Roxani Kristali’s introduction for the book of photographs I’m publishing to document the completed Covid memorial in Pollok Park. She writes on this issue: ‘To publicly commemorate an event is to relegate it to the past—or, at a minimum, to acknowledge that enough experience has accumulated to merit public remembrance. The past, however, is a territory in dispute.’ Roxani is speaking from her experience as a feminist and peacebuilder with survivors of violence in Colombia, with a critical curiosity about how we define an event in time as over. She asks, ‘for whom is the ‘post-conflict’ period truly post? Which violence has really ended and which losses and harms continue …’ .