Disease X manifesto
Disease X
In a dark room in a museum, a lighthouse illuminates my skin. A teacher invites boys and girls to come closer.
"Students, this is a finding dating back to the Anthropocene, please come closer, listen, read and, above all, observe:
"Disease X. With this term we want to represent the awareness that a serious international epidemic can be caused by a pathogen of which we currently do not know the ability to cause diseases."
Way back in 2018, the World Health Organization inserted for the first time with these words the reference to an "X disease" in the list of potentially pandemic infectious diseases from which humanity could not defend itself.
Two years later, starting in January 2020, it seemed that Coronavirus had given a name to the unknown X.
This skin, this embalmed body, belonged to a contemporary artist, who in the midst of chaos and
panic claimed that the real pandemic was the anthropocene itself and indicated how salvation could have come, paradoxically, precisely from microorganisms...
This was his manifesto:
40,000 moments of infinity
40,000 animals are killed every second in the world, just to satisfy our palate.
Most of them are marine animals.
40,000 desperate migrants have lost their lives at sea. 40,000 plastic bottles perpetuate Earth’s liquid nightmare; continuously contaminating ocean water, each second.
On land, it is no better.
Each year, in the U.S.
– that beacon of Western civilization –
drug addiction claims 40,000 lives;
firearms kill 40,000 people;
car accidents result in 40,000 deaths;
40,000 souls commit suicide;
and sexual violence slithers into the lives
of 40,000 girls and children.
Beautiful and precious: our entire "civilization” has
its days numbered... 40,000 days, according to one of the most intelligent scientists of the twentieth century.
40, 000 hours, according to others with newer data.
A handful of years separate us
from a sixth mass extinction.
Soon, a planet home to life for billions of years will
struggle to host even microscopic organisms.
And, yet, microorganisms suggest a way to put an end to this incredible nightmare...
40,000 microorganisms are exchanged in a single kiss. “Infinity captured in the bee's brief visit to a flower".*
On the edge of extinction, only love remains. **
Alfredo Meschi X
That historical period, that global crisis, marked the end of civilization, but also the beginning of a new way of life. That's why in this museum of disappeared civilizations, together with many finds, we still keep its skin today.
*Cyrano de Bergerac
**Guy Mc Phearson
MANIFESTO, QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. Didn't your X's represent the number of animals killed every second in the world?
A. Yes, they are born exactly as the will to freeze, on my skin, at least one second of that holocaust.
Q. And the concept of the blink, the blink of an eye that lasts a tenth of a second is always referred to forty thousand animals, right?
A. Right.
Q. So why all these other meanings , why this manifesto?
A Before I even came across the Animal Kill Counters, where the number of animal victims flows live at insane speed (and hence my decision to stop a second of that madness on my skin), the empowerment of my empathy was aroused by the tragedy of migrant children. The images of their bodies drowned and abandoned on the beaches managed to create a breach in me from which all the other meanings of the number forty thousand then made their way.
Q. Don't you think this can be seen, in the vegan world, as a kind of betrayal?
A. Those who follow me know that even before being an anti-speciesist I was already an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist... My approach to social commitment and social struggle has always been an intersectional one.
Q. But those who gets your X's tattooed, they do that to take a stand against animal oppression or not?
A. I'll ask you a question, are we animals or not?
Q/A. Obvious,so what?
A. So those who get tattooed, they do it because they have come into contact with at least one of the many faces of oppression and domination that are incessantly exercised over animals, humans and non-humans. And on the planet that hosts them.
Q. Don't you think that if this project had been reserved only for vegan people it would have been more powerful and coherent?
A. No, I don't think so, on the contrary I believe that the power of "In the blink of an eye" lies precisely in its openness, Many people belonging to our community are vegan people, but there are many others who are not and clearly they aren’t people less worthy of belonging to it.
I don't think being vegan confers some kind of ethical superiority license.
Q. So it's okay even if an animal breeder gets an X tattooed?
A. I'll answer you with the words of a breeder who has had five Xs tattooed recently: "In this crazy world you need more Xs".
Q. I don't understand...
A. Empathy is amplified in mysterious and unpredictable ways, having one or more Xs tattooed, because we share their spirit and because this manifesto resonates in us, can be one of those ways. I do not hide my being vegan, the ear tag of the Cow named Terra that I wear in my left ear is certainly not an embellishment. But I don't hide my past as a fisherman and hunter either. We are animals suffering from a millenary post traumatic stress syndrome, each and every one of us has their own paces...
And we can only free ourselves all together.
