Viral Atmospheres is an archive to explore how feelings drive a pandemic. It brings together field research from the COVID-19 pandemic conducted by researchers from the extended MoRePPAR Team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Korea, South Africa, China, the US, and Germany. Covid-19 fieldwork is a genre of its own: the researchers had lived through the pandemic—differently—before they engaged ethnographically with these differences in the collaborative study of mobility and immobility during the pandemic. How does Covid-19 field research urge us to rethink the field?¹ In particular, how can we rethink field research as a practice of maneuvering blurred proximities and distances in a productive way? If ‘productive’ means undergoing an education of perceptions², what transformations does the field researcher owe to others?

Viral Atmospheres takes these reflections about the field as a point of departure to approach proximities and distances as distinct perceptions of space. More precisely, in the terminology of the phenomenology of atmospheres, as felt spaces. That is, spaces occupied by feelings that are perceived and enacted by the felt body.³ Rather than conceiving the field as a network of actors and relations (temporal, spatial, and social relations), Viral Atmospheres considers the field as a felt space constituted by affects, forces, and undergoings, configuring how humans and nonhumans come to cross each other’s pathways in unexpected ways. In doing so, felt space captures how proximity and distance are perceived as feelings that drive a situation people find themselves in.

Exploring feelings and space is also crucial for rethinking what drives epidemics or pandemics. During the AIDS pandemic, anthropologists in particular emphasized that the risk of ill health is driven more by structural conditions of poverty, racism, or stigma than by individual risk behavior.⁴ This view paradigmatically contributed to the shift from international to global health in the early 2000s.⁵ Today, so-called social determinants of health are routinely assessed across a broad range of afflictions, showing that social justice and health cannot be separated from each other. Prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists and anthropologists alike argued that we further need to add environmental transformations as drivers of known and unknown zoonotic disease outbreaks.⁶ In this regard, the Covid-19 pandemic has been conceived as an emblematic case for discussing the consequences of the epochal transformations of planetary history, termed the Anthropocene. But, as the initial outbreak of the novel Coronavirus in 2021 quickly advanced to the global Covid-19 pandemic, a broad range of commentators in science and politics agreed that we also need to investigate how mistrust and social media drive this pandemic. Certainly, in past epidemics, people were gripped by feelings of fear, mistrust, and hope, too. However, these feelings were mostly regarded as purely passive perceptions of a threat.⁷ In contrast, the Covid-19 pandemic underlined that feelings are enacted, suggesting that it is not feelings themselves that have been underestimated, but rather their power.

This power is not easily grasped. There is a tendency to simplify feelings such as mistrust (and trust) as acceptance (and refusal) to make them tangible. This simplification surfaces in calls to improve the communication of scientific facts, ignoring that knowledge has little to do with trust or mistrust. Mistrust especially acts as a filter, selecting information that reinforces the felt distance between people, and more importantly, between people and institutions of science, politics, and the media. In this regard, the concept of “affective communication”⁸ has been introduced to understand how social media replaces arguments with affect to account for the amplification of the felt distances between people and institutions. This concept, however, does not capture how affective communication also brings new proximities into being. More generally, the “power of moods”⁹ draws our attention to the ways people perceive their being-in-the world, providing the energy for social and political action.¹⁰ An inquiry into moods and affect suggests that power is formed in the realm of perceptions before anything is actually seen, felt, known, and enacted.

Against this background, Viral Atmospheres asks how images, words, voices, and bodies come to “move” us¹¹—and how these movings come to drive a pandemic. The quotes, images, poems, and recordings presented here exhibit feelings of anger, fear, grief, loneliness, solidarity, and care. While it is often assumed that the power of feelings is a characteristic of shared feelings, affective communication, moods, and viral atmospheres show that understanding the power of feelings requires moving beyond the divide between subjective and intersubjective perceptions of individuals mediated by language. Viral Atmospheres shows how multiple movements—social, emotional, spatial—unexpectedly come to drive the situations in which people find themselves. Across basements in Atlanta, one-room apartments in Seoul, rushing ambulances in South Korea, parking lots in Germany, shuttered border towns in China, and the DRC, and crowded households in Diepsloot in Johannesburg, the archive traces how the pandemic has reshaped everyday life. Initial moments of rupture—emergency transport, sudden border closures, enforced confinement—were followed by stretches in which time slowed down and ordinary spaces changed meaning: homes became unsafe or suffocating, cities fell silent, and anxieties unfolded at a distance. Alongside these disruptions, new forms of connection and adaptation emerged. Queer students built networks of support online, traders reorganized cross-border exchange when mobility collapsed, and families and individuals endured constraints through quiet routines, improvised care, or simply by holding on.

Taken together, these stories do not form a single narrative but a set of shifting atmospheres in which fear, isolation, uncertainty, and change were perceived and enacted. What remains today after the end of the pandemic are traces of how people navigated altered proximities—not through resolution but through adjustment, improvisation, and the ongoing work of continuing life amid new crises.

After the official end of the pandemic, it is the task of experts to evaluate what went wrong and what can be learned for future crises. These assessments will likely focus on consequences that can be measured and compared across public health systems. Yet, the ways feelings linger—in images, words, and sounds, shaping how people experience the world, understand themselves, and navigate crisis—will have greater difficulties to be included in official discussions of the major lessons learned. Hence, Viral Atmospheres is also an attempt to capture what lingers and shape how feelings will drive the next crises.

To this end, Viral Atmosphere presents archiving as a mode of immersion. The archive is a curation of material designed to experiment with the immersive qualities of the internet and ethnography. Archiving-as-immersion is a curatorial practice of documenting, preserving, and engaging with the felt, emergent, spatial, and affective qualities of an environment (an atmosphere) through archival methods that emphasize bodily, sensory, and immersive engagement rather than static records. Instead of storing “what happened,” it asks “what it felt like.”

Viral Atmospheres invites you to engage with the atmospheres of places, events, or social worlds, radiated by the exhibition of materials gathered from contributions during the team’s field research. Each exhibition presents feelings such as fear, solidarity, anger, and hope as atmospheres. Perception is displayed through multisensory and multimodal arrangements of pictures, field notes, and sound recordings collected from six field sites. You will see spaces shaped by atmospheres, encounter the images and words through which they are expressed, and listen to how the researchers relate to the material. The archive becomes a space to be read, seen, and heard. In this sense, Viral Atmospheres aims to document not only feelings during and after the pandemic but also the changing modes of perceiving and enacting them.

Viral Atmospheres is also an attempt to rethink power relations. In his discussion of aura, Walter Benjamin stressed that the possibilities to reproduce art technically entails a far-ranging transformation of art towards what he called the “aestheticization of politics” as exemplified by 20th century fascism.¹² His sharp warning inspired Gerhard Böhme’s reflections on how politics conjures atmospheres to stage power.¹³ Much earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote about atmospheric violence to describe less visible forms of neocolonial subjugation.¹⁴ For these thinkers, engaging with atmosphere was not an intellectual exercise; their reflections on atmospheres are embedded in a critique of human histories of ruination, which remain vital for our time. Benjamin reminds us that the aestheticization of politics does not simply use images to deceive the public; the staging of power essentially distracts from legitimate demands of the destitute to relinquish exploitative property relations.¹⁵ Similarly, Fanon’s central demand in Les damnés de la terre is not retribution for colonial violence, as often assumed, but a radical redistribution of the wealth accumulated through colonial extraction of resources.¹⁶ Thus, Benjamin and Fanon have not only offered foundational insights for contemporary studies of atmospheres that can be used to study how pandemics are driven by feelings. They also show that art and science need to go new ways to critically reflect on the relation between feelings and power in history.

The vital importance of these reflections on history for the present go beyond the scope of this archive. Nonetheless, an immediate and practical application is to experiment with distributed authorship and ownership. Viral Atmospheres takes uses the internet not only to produce an open-access pdf, but also as a digital space to curate a non-hierarchical, non-linear, and open assemblage of exhibitions owned by all. When you enter the archive, all exhibitions appear side by side—from left to right, from top to bottom. You can begin anywhere, and the tags will guide you from one exhibition to the next. Each contribution gives voice to the poems, pictures, and stories provided by interlocutors. In this space, no voice is more important than the other. Rather each voice fits to another.

Moreover, Viral Atmospheres is not a static archive—it is an evolving space shaped by the people who enter it. If something here “moves” you, add your voice. Share a moment, a feeling, a fragment of fieldwork, or a trace that should not disappear from the discussion about what drives pandemics. Your contribution will not just fill a gap—it will shift what this archive can do and who it speaks for. Start anywhere and help us build a living record of how crises and change are felt.

[1] Mirco Göpfert et al., “Fieldwork Meets Crisis: Introduction,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 147 (2022): 1-12.

[2] See Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Contra Ethnography,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (2017).

[3] Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg and München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2014); see also Patrick Eisenlohr, “Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 41.

[4] Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View From Below,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 261-283; Hansjörg Dilger, Leben mit AIDS: Krankheit, Tod und soziale Beziehungen in Afrika. Eine Ethnographie (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2005).

[5] Craig R. Janes and Kitty K. Corbett, “Anthropology and Global Health,” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 167-183.

[6] Stephen Hinchliffe, Lenore Manderson, and Martin Moore, “Planetary Healthy Publics After COVID-19,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 4 (2021): e230-236; Agustín Fuentes, “A (Bio)Anthropological View of the COVID-19 Era Midstream: Beyond the Infection,” Anthropology Now 12, no. 1 (2020): 24-32; Irus Braverman, More-Than-One Health: Humans, Animals, and the Environment Post-COVID (New York: Routledge, 2022).

[7] For example, see Jarrett Zigon, “Hope Dies Last: Two Aspects of Hope in Contemporary Moscow,” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 3 (2009): 253–271; Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Sung-Joon Park, “‘Nobody Is Going to Die’: An Ethnography of Hope, Indicators, and Improvisations in the Provision of Access to Treatment in Uganda,” in The World of Indicators, ed. Richard Rottenburg et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 188–219.

[8] Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2022).

[9] Heinz Bude, Das Gefühl der Welt: Über die Macht von Stimmungen (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2016).

[10] See also Bo Kyeong Seo, “Populist Becoming: The Red Shirt Movement and Political Affliction in Thailand,” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 4 (2019): 555–579.

[11] Eisenlohr, “Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices,” 39.

[12] Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1955) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 42.

[13] Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphäre als Grundbegriff einer neuen Ästhetik,” in Atmosphäre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 43.

[14] Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1961), 65ff.

[15] Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1955), 42.

[16] Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 96.

Benjamin, Walter. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1955). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.

Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphäre als Grundbegriff einer neuen Ästhetik.” In Atmosphäre, 29–52. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013.

Braverman, Irus. More-Than-One Health: Humans, Animals, and the Environment Post-COVID. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Bude, Heinz. Das Gefühl der Welt: Über die Macht von Stimmungen. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2016.

Dilger, Hansjörg. Leben mit AIDS: Krankheit, Tod und soziale Beziehungen in Afrika. Eine Ethnographie. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2005.

Dilger, Hansjörg, and Ute Luig. Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

Eisenlohr, Patrick. “Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 34–54.

Fanon, Frantz. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1961.

Farmer, Paul. “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 261–283.

Fuentes, Agustín. “A (Bio)Anthropological View of the COVID-19 Era Midstream: Beyond the Infection.” Anthropology Now 12, no. 1 (2020): 24–32.

Göpfert, Mirco, et al. “Fieldwork Meets Crisis: Introduction.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 147 (2022): 1–12.

Han, Byung-Chul. Infocracy. Cambridge: Polity, 2022.

Hinchliffe, Stephen, Lenore Manderson, and Martin Moore. “Planetary Healthy Publics After COVID-19.” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 4 (2021): e230–236.

Ingold, Tim. “Anthropology Contra Ethnography.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (2017): 21–26.

Janes, Craig R., and Kitty K. Corbett. “Anthropology and Global Health.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 167–183.

Park, Sung-Joon. “‘Nobody Is Going to Die’: An Ethnography of Hope, Indicators, and Improvisations in the Provision of Access to Treatment in Uganda.” In The World of Indicators, edited by Richard Rottenburg et al., 188–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Schmitz, Hermann. Atmosphären. Freiburg and München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2014.

Seo, Bo Kyeong. “Populist Becoming: The Red Shirt Movement and Political Affliction in Thailand.” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 4 (2019): 555–579.

Zigon, Jarrett. “Hope Dies Last: Two Aspects of Hope in Contemporary Moscow.” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 3 (2009): 253–271.

The conceptional, curatorial and aesthetic development of this project has been shaped by a phenomenological consideration: our experience and perception of the world are co-constituted by affective charges of bodies and space – atmospheres.¹
The literature on the concept of atmosphere has expanded significantly over the last years. Already early on, however, Fanons writings showed how atmospheres emerge as affective and sensory fields that shape embodied experience. Read through contemporary discussions of atmospheres, Fanon’s work can be understood as an early theorization of their staging and of the structuring, transsubjective, environmental quality of feelings.² In his analyses of colonial oppression and violence, atmospheres are not merely subjective impressions but collectively felt environments that press upon the body, reorient perception, and structure how people feel, act and move.³

“The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.

Fanons rich analysis of the affective structures of the colonial space offer deep insight into the multisensory texture and embodied structuring of lived atmospheres, through bodily sensations, spatial impressions, soundscapes, and haptic tensions.⁵ The excerpt arrestingly shows what the phenomenology of atmospheres aims to describe: a felt space – a transsubjective, environmental, and structural quality of feeling that emerges from and enmeshes material and immaterial configurations of bodies and spaces, and powerfully shapes how a situation is perceived and lived.

Read through the lens of atmospheres, this project understands the Covid-19 pandemic and the mobility regimes that governed it as a profoundly spatial situation that people inhabited and experienced feelingly, through the environments they encountered it in: their homes, their workplaces, their life worlds. It proposes that the emerging Viral Atmospheres shaped how people were “moved” by these situations and how they perceived, interacted with, and remembered them.

"The task for this archive was to develop a digital structure that could map these affective geographies, across seven different field sites. It required designing a mode of presentation that could not only hold together these multiple places, voices, perspectives, and temporalities, but also attend to the sensory and affective richness of the material."

As Böhme and Griffero argue, subjective experience is essential to understanding atmospheres. To engage with them is to engage feelingly; it requires immersing oneself in them.⁶ In this sense, immersion is the experiential condition that allows atmospheric qualities to be perceived.

But the aim of this project is not to reproduce pandemic atmospheres themselves. It collects and presents the sensory and narrative traces that remain: memories, testimonies, images, sounds, and spatial impressions. The aim is to create an environment in which these memories can be explored, inviting a felt proximity to the material that acknowledges its local situatedness while enabling connections across geographic, experiential, and thematic distances. It is an archive, built not just to retain, but to be engaged with, to involve and immerse, to give life to new meaning. It is an “archive on show”: a ‘curatorial situation’ that merges perspectives of interlocutors, researchers and curators in opposing modes of archiving and exhibiting, of inward facing modes of preserving and outward facing modes of presenting and sharing.⁷

Developing a creative and curatorial concept to this end, by nature, is an interdisciplinary task that needs to move between different atmospheric registers of affective memories, ethnographic accounts and exhibition design. It requires drawing on multiple genres of work and connecting insights from phenomenology with curatorial, aesthetic, structural, and digital considerations, and to read them together in a mode of synthesis. Immersion lies at the crossroad where these insights meet.

As Murray writes, the idea of immersion in a “simulated place” derives from the physical experience of being submerged in a body of water: a medium that surrounds the perceiver, responds to their movements, and forms a coherent world affecting their senses.⁸ Böhme, from a phenomenological perspective, understands immersion as the hybridization of what he calls Darstellungsraum (representational space) and leiblichem Raum (the space of bodily presence): moments in which a represented world becomes felt as an extension of one’s own spatial presence.⁹ The question for us is here how digital media can allow visitors to immerse themselves into an archive on show, of ethnographic and atmospheric traces.

Digital media can directly embed photographic, videographic, and sonographic impressions. They expand the multisensory repertoire of representation beyond text alone, creating a richer ground for approaching the affective resonances of the material. As the literature on atmospheres shows, they can be approached as environmental assemblages of sensory impressions. This insight guided the development of the archive as a series of multisensory constellations: short ethnographic texts are interwoven with photographs, video sequences, and ambient soundscapes that trace the environments in which people’s memories of the pandemic are embedded.

Through this sensory layering, each field site takes on a distinctive atmospheric character that can be encountered not only conceptually but sensorially, through the intermediate surface of the screen.¹⁰

As Bruno argues, the screen itself acts as a porous surface of mediation – a site where images, sounds, and affects travel as ambient transmissions.¹¹ In this sense, the sensory materials do not just depict environments; they become projections that mediate spatial tonalities (or what their recorders perceived as such). Bruno calls this a mode of “sympathetic empathy”¹², in which viewers feel their way into the moods and textures of a space through the way images, sounds, and light resonate across the screen. This allows what Bruno calls “atmospheres of projection” to be approached as relational fields that extend between viewers, authors, curators and materials in digital space¹³ – fields that mediate, rather than replicate, the atmospheric resonances of the pandemic environments encountered in our researcher’s work.

Yet in digital environments, beyond the capacity for embedding of multisensory material, immersion also arises through movement – through navigating a space that has depth, detail, and responsiveness. Digital media are inherently spatial, modular, procedural, participatory and variable.¹⁴ With an appropriate interface, they can change in response to user actions – via cursor movement or more elaborate forms of avatars – and simulate a sequence of different environments and impressions. This creates the illusion of moving and navigating within the digital environment, according to one’s actions.¹⁵

Even without a full VR setup, digital environments can function as navigable worlds. This experience is increased when the environment enhances the feeling of digital mobility through animating parts of the user’s journey: Areas designed for free navigation across a digital canvas, the movement of objects on the screen in response to user action, the appearance of elements upon ‘entering’ a new part of the space, the opening and closing of parts of the interface on activation. Engaging with a digital environment means learning its logic: immersion depends on the coherence and consistency of the world’s internal rules, because it supports what Murray calls the “active creation of belief” – the user’s belief to be present in a world of its own.¹⁶

These elements correspond with experiences in what Böhme calls the Handlungsraum (space of action), a mode of experiencing felt-bodily presence in space through active involvement.¹⁷ Through responsiveness to users’ movements and interactions, digital spaces create a sense of bodily involvement in a representational space and allows users to project themselves into the digital environment.¹⁸

Böhme argues that immersion requires a full hybridization of representational space and the space of bodily presence, an experience that is most palpably realized by tools like VR-Goggles. Without a shared space of bodily presence, an image (what is depicted) separate from a tableau (the material reality it is congruent with) can otherwise only create an abstract or partial experience of hybridization rather than full immersion.¹⁹ Bruno complicates this view by bringing our attention from Handlungsraum to atmospheric envelopment and to the immersive and affective capacities of screens as projections. For her, immersion does not require full hybridization of spaces of representation and bodily presence but can arise through the ambient, transductive circulation of light, color, movement, and affect across screen surfaces. Immersion becomes an experience of being enveloped by a mediated ambiance. This perspective allows us to understand digital immersion as a different atmospheric mode: one produced through the permeability, empathetic attunement, and circulation of affect across images, surfaces, and “navigational space”.²⁰²¹

Our archive does not attempt to stage or recreate the atmospheres encountered in the MoRePPaR research, rather, it creates conditions that invite one to encounter the ethnographic materials through which these atmospheres have been approached with empathic proximity. It presents the sensory and narrative traces through which these atmospheres are remembered, interpreted, and articulated, and arranges them within an atmospheric field of its own – an immersive digital environment, in which visitors can project themselves through different modes of interactivity, navigation, and digital mobility.

This understanding of immersion has guided the development of our archival exhibition as a universe of field site impressions, rich in sensory details and interactive features, providing different modes of exploration of the material connected by a highly detailed and consistent digital-spatial experience.

In its basic configuration, our archive is organized along the respective field sites in which the ethnographic research took place. The profoundly spatial dimension of pandemic experiences, co-shaped by mobility regimes and pandemic regulations, affected homes and routines, living and working environments, public and social spaces, communities. As many of the stories in this collection reveal, pandemic regimes and practices reconfigured familiar spaces and how they were felt and navigated – infusing them with new affective tunings and meaning. For this reason, our archive initially is geographically anchored. By exploring a mosaic of various, multi-sensory impressions from the field sites, visitors can engage with atmospheric memories in relation to local spatio-affective impressions and socio-historical conditions of research contexts. This makes the spatial perception and enactment of Viral Atmospheres tangible and encounterable, while accounting for the situatedness of ethnographic knowledge through the audiovisual presence of the researchers, whose voices accompany the material.

This design of the field sites as layered assemblages of impressions is an interpretive gesture toward the ephemeral and shifting character of atmospheres: they appear as fields that visitors can expand or contract as they move through the archive. In reference to Schmitz’s description of expansion and contraction as registers of the felt body,²² the modular and variable structure of digital media allows each field site assemblage to draw inward toward its geographical anchoring or unfold outward across the digital canvas.

In this extended state, field site impressions become enmeshed with one another, enabling the tracing of emergent connections through sensory resonances and shared motifs, structured by tags and themes.²³ In contrast to static, unisequential formats, the digital environment supports multisequentiality – the possibility of many different pathways through a single body of material – making navigation open-ended and relational rather than following a predetermined sequence. Visitors can follow curiosity, conceptual affinity, or emotional resonance to form new constellations of meaning. This kaleidoscopic, serendipitous mode of exploration reconfigures materials in shifting constellations, supporting associative and iterative engagement. By forming new associative relations, proximities and distances between impressions, new meaning can emerge and resonances and tensions that pattern these accounts of pandemic Viral Atmospheres are made visible. The associative logic of navigation – moving across a large digital canvas, following emerging relations, encountering newly appearing elements – mirrors the research process of the MoRePPaR project itself, in which disparate field sites became interconnected through mutual visits, as well as online and offline working sessions in changing constellations.

Together with multisensory content, spatial metaphors, and moving interface, this kaleidoscopic structure forms an immersive interaction design that turns the digital archival space into its own atmospheric environment – a space in which one can encounter affective, multisensory ethnographic material through multiple, interrelated angles. This approach draws on traditions of postmodern hypertext narratives and multiform storytelling that challenged the constraints of unisequential authorship by offering multiple pathways through modular and heterarchically presented texts.²⁴ Translated into the register of exhibition design, these ideas become tools for exploring complex, multisited material, where meaning unfolds through movement, choice, and prismic juxtaposition.

The thematic lens of Viral Atmospheres and the project’s international structure called for a design capable of holding layered, contrasting, and juxtaposed places, voices, perspectives, and temporalities within a sensory-rich environment. While bound by the limits of mediation, the archive offers a complex and textured perspective on the manifold ways people experienced and inhabited the atmospheres of pandemic spaces. What emerges is not a linear and static narrative, but a kaleidoscope of perceptions, a field of shifting resonances and contrasts. It stands in reference to Ellingson’s work on crystallization – a framework for qualitative research that combines different modes of researching and representing into one or several bodies of multi-genre “openly partial” texts – to account for the complexity of a researched phenomenon, the constructedness of knowledge and the layered perspectives and positionalities of researchers and interlocutors involved.²⁵

In this sense, the archive becomes a testimony to how these atmospheres – remaining in affective memories and orientations, altered lifeworlds and communities – extend their reach into the present.

[1] Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Baden-Baden: Karl Alber, 2014).

[2] Sung Joon Park, “A Fanonian Anthropology of the Atmosphere of Felt Disasters and Felt Changes: Revisiting Fanon to Explore the Felt Disasters of War, Epidemics, and Humanitarian Interventions in the Tenth Ebola Epidemic in Eastern DRC,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15, no. 2 (2025): 431–32, 434; see also Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68.

[3] Hye Yun Kang, “Atmospheric Violence: Fanon and Postcolonial Subjectivity,” International Theory, published online September 23, 2025, 1–23. (No volume/issue yet assigned.)

[4] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 39.

[5] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 37–40, 53–54, 55–58.

[6] Daniela Galati, Prospettive sulle emozioni e teorie del soggetto (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), 84, quoted in Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), 3; Gernot Böhme, “Felt Spaces,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, ed. Jane Grant, John Matthias, and David Prior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 29–36, at 31.

[7] Beatrice von Bismarck, “Archives on Show: An Introduction,” in Archive on Show: Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing. A Curatorial Glossary, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck (Berlin: Archive Books, 2022), 48, 69.

[8] Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, updated ed. (New York: The Free Press, 2016), 99.

[9] Gernot Böhme, “Wirklichkeiten. Über die Hybridisierung von Räumen und die Erfahrung von Immersion,” in Jahrbuch Immersiver Medien 2013: Online – Gestimmte Räume und sinnliche Wahrnehmung, vol. 5 (Marburg: Schüren, 2013), 20–21.

[10] Giuliana Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2022), 87.

[11] Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, 50, 76, 78.

[12] Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, 78–82.

[13] Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection.

[14] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 49–65; Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 72–96.

[15] Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 91–94, 120.

[16] Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 107–9.

[17] Böhme, “Wirklichkeiten,” 19, 21.

[18] Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, 111.

[19] Böhme, “Wirklichkeiten,” 20–21; Gernot Böhme, Analoge Kompetenzen im digitalen Zeitalter, ed. Gernot Böhme, Kai Buchholz, and Ute Gahlings (Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2022), 17–18.

[20] Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 81.

[21] Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, 89–118.

[22] Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Owen Müllan, and Jan Slaby, “Emotions Outside the Box: The New Phenomenology of Feeling and Corporeality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 2 (2011): 245.

[23] Tags and themes are the result of the interconnected discussions in our team, over the course of which thematic resonances between the fieldsites began to arise. We decided to pay tribute to these resonances. While the explanatory layer of the themes provide a soft, more extensive guideline for reading these resonances, the tags function as one-word connections. Similar to the ethnographic coding-process, all tagging terms emerged grounded in the research of the different fieldsites themselves and provide a means to connect resonating stories. Yet, there is a tension arising from these traveling terms, as they collapse what is specific in each site. In this sense, the stories and fieldsite impressions collected under one such term sometimes stand in tension and speak back, challenging generality of the terms and other fieldsite material they come into collection with.

[24] Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 127, 128–30, 142–47.

[25] Laura L. Ellingson, Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2011).

Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68.

Bismarck, Beatrice von. “Archives on Show: An Introduction.” In Archive on Show: Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing. A Curatorial Glossary, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck. Berlin: Archive Books, 2022.

Böhme, Gernot. Analoge Kompetenzen im digitalen Zeitalter. Edited by Gernot Böhme, Kai Buchholz, and Ute Gahlings. Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2022.

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When the Moreppar research began in 2022, the acute phase of the pandemic was officially over. Now, in 2025, social distancing signs, still found in unexpected places, have become faint reminders of a time when they were omnipresent in public spaces. Abandoned testing sites are a fading echo of a time when proof of health status was required for work, travel or to protect others; media coverage focuses on other (global) crises that follow one another at breathtaking speed. However, the pandemic has not disappeared entirely from people’s lives. People still fall ill or die; others suffer the long-term effects of infection or vaccination. Staying, too, are the dissatisfaction and anger directed at public health measures; feelings of injustice these experiences provoked often reinforced mistrust of political institutions and scientific knowledge, undermining acceptance of official interventions. Equally enduring are the painful memories of isolation, broken relationships, serious illness, and loss.

The Moreppar project asks: What remains of the pandemic—materially, emotionally, and socially? And how are these remnants shaped by the ruptures the pandemic created in everyday life, particularly the early stages of the outbreak? While some traces are visible—discursive, bureaucratic, spatial, material—we equally focus on the less tangible, but deeply felt, ways the pandemic continues to shape lives: through embodied memories, altered affective relations, and new modes of societal organization. At the heart of the project therefore is an exploration of the affective and emotional consequences of Covid-19: how the crisis affected intimacy, social bonds, biographies, and people’s capacities to survive—biologically, socially, economically.

One of the defining features of how the pandemic was experienced was the extensive regulation of people’s movement through a variety of models, policies and technologies. During COVID-19, mobility regimes comprised various forms of restriction that often overlapped and were shaped by local, national and global political and legal regulations, as well as the scientific understanding of the impact of mobility on the progression of epidemics. The restriction of movement—as well as the manner in which certain professional groups were permitted or even forced to remain mobile—came to embody state power and its highly unequal operation within and across populations. As governments imposed sweeping restrictions, daily life was upended. Movement across borders and within neighborhoods was curtailed. Work moved to domestic spaces or ceased entirely. In other cases, so-called “essential” workers had to continue working, often without the necessary financial or social recognition. This project argues that the affective and socio-material impact of COVID-19—as well as the entirely novel approaches to restricting and regulating movement—continue to shape people’s lives in ways that surpass how they consciously think about or remember them.

What affective, and sometimes traumatic, legacies did these disruptions leave behind? In what ways have pandemic-related health policies reshaped material infrastructures, forms of solidarity, and modes of governance and political engagement? To what extent can these transformations have consequences for broader models of pandemic preparedness? We address these questions through ethnographic research conducted as part of the transnational project, “Mobility Regimes of Pandemic Preparedness and Response: The Case of COVID-19,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation since 2022. By focusing on four groups that were particularly affected by mobility regulations—cross-border traders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), essential workers such as truck drivers, market vendors and construction workers in Germany, township residents in South Africa, and young professionals and church members in South Korea—we explore the affective, social and political reverberations of the pandemic in their lives. The project is enriched by additional research in China, Argentina and the USA of involved Master and PhD students.

By relating these diverse settings to one another, the project identifies the commonalities and differences in how people coped, or did not cope, with the impact of mobility regimes on the most intimate aspects of their lives, as well as how they are living with the aftermath of the pandemic. A central focus of our analysis is the role of affect, examining how emotions such as fear, exhaustion, grief, hope, and resilience have shaped new modes of solidarity and contestation, and continue to influence people’s attitudes and practices long after the official end of the pandemic. We argue that these affective afterlives, which we conceptualize as “pandemic lingering”, are crucial to understanding the pandemic’s enduring impact on individuals and whole societies, thereby having the potential to influence the trajectory of social coexistence in the years to come.

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