On epidemiological ruination

“[W]e live now … in a time of ruination,” Brian Dillon wrote in the catalogue for a 2011 exhibition on ruins. The twenty-first century is already marked, he claimed, by recession and war, and “flourishing [with] images of catastrophe and decay”. Now, we witness the economic ruins of COVID-19: town centres and public spaces emptied; shops shuttered; workers ‘furloughed’. Just a week into lockdown, wild goats descended into Llandudno – a Welsh seaside resort, already struggling in the age of cheap (now grounded) air travel – nibbling at vacant gardens and shitting unmolested in the silent streets.