“The virus comes to stalk us from the ruins, its edges traceable in statistics or symptoms, but never seen directly; it causes dis-ease. Uncertainty. It is a reminder of things we have agreed to forget, whispering from crowded hospital wards, lurking in supermarket aisles, and bus stops. It comes too close.”
Contagious Collaborators and Microbial Kin:
Re-worlding in the Company of Infectious Agents beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic
Exploring the incursion of SARS-2 COVID-19 into human cultures at the beginning of 2020, this paper investigates how microbial, and specifically viral, worlds might be positioned as beneficial companions in telling the stories of our times and radically reconfiguring what possible futures come next. While most intellectual efforts to understand COVID-19 have had the intention to control, suppress or eradicate it, approaching the pathogen through a posthumanist framework enables the consideration of what viral worlds might invite if approached as a collaborative agency, rather than adversary. How might thinking with and through COVID-19 reconfigure relations between human and non-human worlds in not just the present but also the future? Developed and delivered during 2020, Emissary 2920 (E2920) was a participatory, multiplatform, and pervasive two-week experience delivered to local audiences experiencing lockdown in Narrm/Melbourne. This work positioned participants as timetravelling emissaries from the future Department of Human/Viral Relations who had volunteered to complete field work and gather experiential, sensory data from within the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper utilises the thematic sequences of E2920 to frame an extended inquiry into the potential of human/viral entanglements and shared futurity, and considers the transformative ideological opportunities available through viral interventions by asking: What futures become available if the vital agencies of virus worlds are welcomed as co-conspirators in their making? How do viruses reimagine the human? And how might these infectious agents demonstrate the model for adaptation, hope and collective care so urgently needed in these post-normal, post-pandemic times?
You can read the full work here, and see all of Swamphen Vol 10. (2024): Ngā Tohu o te Huarere: Conversations Beyond Human Scales here.
