THE VIRUS MANIFESTO

Untitled, by Carlos Martinez. Ink, acrylic, and holographic foil on canvas, 2020

The Virus Manifesto is an interspecies political calling towards a reality infected by the virus. A calling to take the transformative power of crisis and build a virus-consciousness that can help us create new ways of worldmaking premised on systems of survival, care, and solidarity. The need to politicize the virus has become imperative since returning to a sense of normalcy is now increasingly impossible. The Virus Manifesto, therefore, not only hopes to provide a counter-narrative to the way in which the COVID-19 crisis has been characterized, but more importantly, it wants to insist on the need to construct a sustainable and reliable culture of care. The manifesto is not a theorization on the event of a crisis, but a call to make caring for others our most radical political act, so that declaring ourselves in solidarity also means emerging from this pandemic with a renewed notion of our humanness, one that transcends the obsolescent idea of Man.1 Moreover, the Virus Manifesto resists and condemns the racist rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic to underscore that viruses as part of the origin of life can challenge us, but ultimately also provide us with the possibility of continuity on earth.