During the past months of national lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we, the two co-creators of this Triptych-intervention in current viral ontologies, have met over Skype. We have kept up intense conversations and poetic exchanges, digitally crossing the 12,000 kilometres between our physical locations on Chile’s Pacific coast and on a Danish island, located in between the Baltic Sea and waters that can be described as bays of the North Sea. We have been engaged in such practices ever since we met in 2016 and began sharing cancer stories. In 2018, in the midst of research and creative writing for our forthcoming book, Sandcastles: cancerous bodies and their necro/powers,1 we came upon the relationship between cancer ecologies and viruses, and the understudied role that viruses play in the pathways to certain cancers. This led us to think about the agency of viruses more generally, and their non/living status.2,3 We were in the throes of this creative and philosophical research when the virus SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19, came onto the global scene, raising questions on the life-death spectrum, on isolation, and on the ecologies of proliferating viral agencies, co-shaping the world, and all of us (humans and non-humans) who are of this world. With this Triptych we want to share our thoughts and feelings on these questions. We use the word ‘tale’ in the title of our Triptych to indicate that our intervention is a poetic fabulation4, meant to prompt new imaginaries and ethical speculations about other — more caring and less anthropocentric — worlding practices than the currently dominant ones.
Footnotes
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Forthcoming from the Authors. ↩
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M Radomska, ‘Promises of Non/Living Monsters and Uncontainable Life’, Somatechnics, vol. 8, no. 2, 2018, p. 215-231. ↩
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M Radomska. Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart. Linköping: Linköping University Press. 2016 ↩
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D Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, 2016. ↩