First Response

The Covid-19 pandemic, which manifested itself during the early months of 2020, resulted in the activation of the expected official actors on a national and international level in policy, politics, the industrial military complex, pharma and medicine, among others. Being suddenly confined to a minimum of physical interaction, we found ourselves online among a concerned but enthusiastic group of artists, hackers, activists, scholars and other practitioners who organise themselves in informal settings to share, discuss and devise strategies of coping, care and action. They aim to apply their own artistic, activist or research competence to work through the complexities of continuously shifting information and circumstances. The pandemic is not simply an epidemiological crisis but a crisis of sovereignty. We refer here to the notion of sovereignty raised by Achille Mbembe to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. Also the question of liveability comes to mind as introduced by Judith Butler and which the pandemic spread out in a wide spectrum, starting from the bare form of Who gets to live? - when it comes to access to medical support and decisions of care - up to What is a liveable life during a pandemic lockdown? In this way the pandemic makes visible and amplifies what was already there, a systemic plurality of inequalities and oppression enacted by predominant hegemonies. As Divya Dwivedi pointed out, the pandemic reveals a different sense of crisis, that is how the processes that have organised life (and lives) are distributed across the world and how some components of this worldwide arrangement have arrived at their functional limits. Therefore, once again, what has been unveiled are the material conditions of structural and systemic violence. Throughout this issue, questions related to temporality, agency, care and scale are addressed from artistic practice(s) critically reflecting on the entanglement with the virus.