Contagious Collaborators and Microbial Kin: Re-worlding in the Company of Infectious Agents beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic

Being published by Swamphen Journal of Cultural Ecology in December 2023, this peer reviewed work explores the incursion of SARS-2 COVID-19 into human cultures at the beginning of 2020, wondering at how microbial, and specifically viral worlds might be positioned as a beneficial companion 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? Creating the opportunity for an experiential encounter with this question, Emissary 2920 (E2920) was a participatory, multiplatform, and pervasive two-week experience delivered to local audiences experiencing the rolling lockdowns of 2020 in Narrm/Melbourne. This work positioned participants as time-travelling emissaries from the future Institute of Human-Viral Relations who had volunteered to complete field work and gather experiential, sensory data from within the COVID-19 pandemic.