Work on the printed issue of the RTV Magazine began in a world where human beings practiced unpunished proximity, held hands and kissed on the lips to greet; it ends in a reality where everything, from keys to the airport apron, undergoes disinfection, street fashion promotes medical casual style and distance is enforced with a fine. Over the past two weeks, the imagination of Steven Soderbergh, the director of the 2011 film “Contagion”, has become real.

After a short, destabilizing shock, culture is transferring what can be transferred online, adapting to the several formats offered by corporate social networks; the working bodies stay at home.
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There is no escape from the catastrophe, so, as Donna Haraway postulates, we have to stay with the trouble, that is, learn to live with it. After the pandemic more challenges are likely to come; economic, political, ecological crises. Human history teaches us that every generation faced a challenge they were unable to prepare for: colonization, witch-hunt, World War I and II, Transformation, ecological disaster, and now the pandemic. Queer magic can help to overcome powerlessness, be a tool of emancipation that breaks the regime of patriarchal rationality enforcing the absurd separation of man and nature. In her essay “Three Ecologies In The World of Climate Crisis (And Coronavirus)”, Aleksandra Jach writes about the revision of values brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic which does not wait for consensus, agreements, summits and negotiations, but requires a change in the way of living right now. This is not the time for a peaceful Lenten reflection, contrary to what Bruno Latour writes in his quarantine essay: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” published by Critical Inquiry. The problem is not this particular virus, but the centuries-old patriarchal-capitalist exploitation that causes a constant threat to life, not only human life. It is time for a radical and necessary change in the way we perceive what a community is, for a re-evaluation of paradigms, so that the future will not be a repetition of an authoritarian nightmare, but a story of the emancipation of many from the oppression of few.
May it be now!

Text: Zofia nierodzińska

Translation: Joanna Figiel

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