Prior to this meeting I spent time with the 4 works for the Piccadilly site and built some reflections around each one individually. Each one leads to a set of questions that I offered Tony Cokes in advance of our conversation. I wanted to be responsive to the work itself, watching, listening, reading and writing at once, processing things and articulating my thoughts immediately and instinctively. These notes and questions, that I sent to Tony Cokes, became a point of departure for the conversation transcribed below. We spoke for almost 2 hours using Zoom on the 18^th of January, 2021. 

Lynton Talbot Hi, Tony. How are you? How’s things where you are?

Tony Cokes All right. How are you? It’s probably not the worst, but probably not the best either. I mean, the situation with Covid is just a disaster of non-planning. It’s not even really considered. The government think it’s going to go away on its own. No real strategies in place. Its’s just chaotic. You would want to impute a kind of will to this disaster in a certain sense, but even in terms of the discourse, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of desire. There’s no thinking about what the actual ramifications are, the government are not prepared for the obvious problems that existed before, that are now thrown into hyperbole. Nobody seems to have an address to them. So, it’s really, really frustrating.