The emergence of potentially pandemic pathogens is at heart of the workings of industrial animal farming, due both to the internal organization of this productive system and to the expansion of contact zones with forest systems and their microbial ecologies. The growing contamination during the COVID-19 pandemic among meat locker and slaughterhouse workers with the new Coronavirus is noticeable in the USA, Germany and Brazil. Despite rigorous biosecurity protocols which regulate industrial activities, this event makes us face the work of contact and intimacy with other non-human materialities (bacteria, fungi, viruses and other forms of microscopic life) which construct the environments proper to the evolution of these diseases. Continuing the discussion of our previous Multispecies Landscapes roundtable, we propose a debate around the theoretic and methodological difficulties of thinking about the pandemic as a multispecies event, i.e. the relation between humans, institutions, artifacts, technologies, but also animals and environments in processes of health and disease.

From the start of the millennium, the Anthropocene has become a hotly debated topic, as well as a site for hopeful and apocalyptic predictions. Understanding that the living conditions of the Holocene are disappearing every day is crucial if we mean to engage in meaningful scientific and political action against the many consequences of climate change. The Anthropocene is the proposal of a new geological epoch that foregrounds how anthropogenic action, or inaction, has transformed the Earth. However, in the last 20 years this proposal has faced many different criticisms, to wit, that its framing of the driving forces of anthropogenic environmental change ignores historical disparities connected to race, gender, class, and coloniality; or that its proximity with discourses of Earth-stewardship and geoengineering may actually present more of a risk than an aid in fighting climate change. After two decades of intense debate, how is the case for the Anthropocene looking like?

In 1924, the art historian Aby Warburg conceived the Atlas Mnemosyne: an assembling of images by panels whose associations and affinities happen by a non-linear and anachronic method of transmission. In 2017, the anthropologist Anna Tsing allied with other researchers to invent the Feral Atlas: an interactive database that arranges on the same plane the different forms of multispecies conviviality. These atlases propose, each one of them working by its singular means, that we may perceive unusual connections between elements—and therefore associate references through an experience affected by the concepts of process and encounter. It seems that the provisionality of such organizations is assured by the logical contexts of an image, that tends to resist defining and definitive significations. In this Cosmic Conversation, we would like to discuss the relations between an atlas and political, artistic and scientific conceptions of thought, as well as debate the improvements offered by the functioning of the former to some ways of seeing or reading.