ABSTRACT
The Epilogue explores what hope there is for the future in the current global situation of the coronavirus pandemic and signs indicating that the planet has tipped into its sixth mass-extinction event. The COVID-19 pandemic offers some prospect of developing a new aesthetics of monumentality, centred around an ecology of remembrance that counters environmental pressures, themselves partly responsible for the virus’s spread. A critique is provided of ‘carbon neutral’ monuments and a case made that we cannot treat a monument containing embedded carbon (from mining and manufacturing processes) as truly ecological. The chapter looks to the Mesolithic period, a time of great environmental upheaval, as a place that can provide new inspiration for a monumentality that ‘leaves no trace’, unlike the Neolithic stone cultures that have historically been so prized as what makes European cultures ‘civilised’. To embrace a Mesolithic monumentality, which shows that rich and complex structures can be based around wooden or biodegradable materials, and a microlithic stone culture privileging the small and the portable, could provide a new direction for the monumental challenges yet to be faced. D.W. Winnicott’s potential space, and its need for the overlapping between internal will and external realities, is the key to understanding this ecological space and how we might reconfigure ourselves within it.
