Epilogue: The remaking of collective life in (post)pandemic times

Trafi-Prats, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3468-1073 and Castro-Varela, Aurelio (2022) Epilogue: The remaking of collective life in (post)pandemic times. In: Visual participatory arts based research in the city: ontology, aesthetics and ethics. Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City . Routledge, London, pp. 143-151. ISBN 9780367462963 (hardback); 9781003027966 (ebook)

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Abstract

In pandemic times, participatory arts-based research could function as a space from where to devise practices that break down with the concept of the human exceptionalism, which has been so present in the science of the pandemic, by recognizing and speculatively engaging with the Covid-19’s situated environmental entanglements. Through the pandemic, people have witnessed how human lives have been featured as an abstraction made of numbers, lines, curves, tables, predictive mathematical models and lists of positive cases and deaths internationally, per country, and per postcode. As Ferreira da Silva notes, such processes of abstraction have worked to think the pandemic through generalizations which have occluded singularity, the singularity of every life. The dual organization of Covid-19’s public discourse around humanization on one side, and naturalization through the public prominence of immunological research on the other, has constituted an exemplary enactment of Whiteheads’ bifurcation of nature.