The Hologram w/ Cassie Thornton

07 Jul The Hologram w/ Cassie Thornton

By Chris Hoff

Recently I had a chance to speak with Berlin based artist Cassie Thornton about the hologram a feminist peer-to-peer health for a post pandemic future. In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, how can we take health and care back into our hands? Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care, a viral peer-to-peer feminist health network. The premise is simple, three people, a triangle, meet on a regular basis to focus on the physical, mental, and social health of a fourth; the hologram. The hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and receive care. Each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, and so the system expands.

Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis and directly engaging with mutual aid and the coronavirus pandemic, art activism and science fiction collide, the hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need for the anti-capitalist struggles of the present and the post-capitalist society of the future. Artist Cassie Thornton, of the feminist economics department has worked with and written about art against capitalist financialization extensively. She has hypnotized hedge fund managers to have them see the debt they owe us, and she created an alternative credit reporting system to support people to get housing and jobs in spite of massive techno gentrification. She’s given cursed paintings to bankers who profit off of destroying public schools, and she’s taught liberation feminist economics in corporate yoga studios. Three years ago, she also launched a collective mutual aid protocol called The Hologram, which we’re going to talk about today, and wrote a book about it that was published by Pluto Press. Let’s meet Cassie.

Cassie: Hi, Chris.

Chris:

It’s great to see you. Appreciate you making the time all the way from Berlin, and I am really excited to talk about, well, a couple of your projects, but I really want to maybe just start by asking about specifically The Hologram; what it is, how does it work, and how did it come to be?

Cassie:

Yeah. The Hologram is a peer to peer health practice that is practiced from couches and beds around the world. It’s really like a protocol for how to have a meeting, and I think it’s useful to know that it came through me kind of because I was an anti-debt activist for a long time. I feel like I was an artist and an activist really focused on what debt and living in a debt-based society does to us in terms of how alienated we feel, how forced we are to loan and responsible for our own health in many ways, and I think we maybe stop feeling like a part of society and start feeling more just completely alone. Yeah. I think I was kind of an expert in reporting on what debt was doing to people, and I came up with lots and lots of ways to investigate that. I was really wishing for a kind of antidote. I was really, really excited to research lots of different anti-debt movements and what those anti-debt movements manifested.

One of the things that surprised me most was looking at the Greek debt crisis and how austerity and an influx of migrants escaping war and poverty, the response by lots of different people, anarchists, NGOs, churches, was to create free health clinics all over Greece. I heard it almost like a rumor that there was this one clinic that was not only giving free care to anyone that walked in, but they wanted to experiment with giving non-hierarchical care. This was the social solidarity clinic in Thessaloniki, and I really did hear a rumor and eventually went to Greece to try to figure out who was doing it and what they were up to, because all I heard was that as a patient you would go in and you’d be seen by a doctor and a social worker and a therapist at the same time, and that those people would interview you altogether. That just blew my mind.

From an American perspective, how far could we get away from what we experience? This meeting was supposed to be 90 minutes long, and then at the end of the meeting, as the rumor went, and as I found to be true, the person receiving the care was led to sort of say what they wanted and what they thought they needed after they heard themselves speak about their physical and mental, emotional and social well-being. That type of support just blew my mind and that influenced lots of different experiments over the years. A lot of times I used my practice as an artist as an excuse to practice this. I would say, I’ve got this art show at a nonprofit space. They can’t really pay me for my work, but I could accept an exchange where we could experiment with my idea. Lots of different experiments happened over time. Lots of cooks have been in this kitchen.

Then I think the other really important part of this is that I moved from Oakland, California, where this idea first was born to me, to rural middle of nowhere in Canada, which is actually really the middle of somewhere. It’s called Thunder Bay. I got to work in indigenous, queer, and two-spirit feminist street patrol in one of the most dangerous parts of Canada, probably the most dangerous part of Canada. I just learned a lot about mutual aid. I learned a lot about collective work, about the politics of recognition and resisting that and about what collective organizing can be.

I would say The Hologram at its very roots has that involved in it. Now we’ve been growing and more people have become involved over the years, I would say now it’s influenced by a lot of different social movements and practices that other people have brought in. Just to be a little bit more granular about what it is, maybe I can just explain how I do it. In the model, there’s one person that asks for support from three people, and we call that person a hologram. I’m a hologram. Three years ago, I invited three people that I know to meet with me regularly, and those three people mostly meet with me. We all meet in a group. They ask me questions, and one person asks me questions about my social health, one person asks me about my physical health, and one person asks me about my mental and emotional health. There’s a whole ritual around it. The meeting is a protocol. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s quite structured.

For example, we do a kind of small somatic piece at the beginning and at the closing we do reflections and feedback from the people that are asking questions. We call those people the triangle. My job as the hologram is not to reciprocate what I receive. I don’t turn around to my triangle and say, thank you so much. How are you? My job is to make sure that they have the support that they want. The secret theme of the project is making sure the people that give care are cared for. It’s a negotiation. Do they want triangles? Do they also want to be a hologram like me, or do they want something else? One of my triangle members sees a psychoanalyst four days a week. He doesn’t want anything else, and that’s totally okay, but we have to have those conversations. The project grows virally that way, at least hypothetically. I think we’ve learned a lot about how it grows and it’s much more complex than the systematic approach, but that was kind of the seed of the idea.

Chris:

You described The Hologram as an open source peer-to-peer viral social technology for dehabituating humans from capitalism. I’m wondering if you could say more about that.

Cassie:

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of layers to that. I think the simplest part of that is that I think in capitalism, which is obviously so overlapped with patriarchy and racism and all of that and colonialism, but whatever the cocktail is that we’ve been living with for the past century or so, we have been really led to be self-sustaining, independent people who if we ask for help, it must mean that there’s something wrong with us. I think this is the main thing, really getting over asking for help and realizing that it’s so hard to be vulnerable in this way to ask for support, especially from a non-professional, to ask help and be vulnerable among people you know and to let yourself be held, but not for an exchange.

There’s so many elements of it that I think confront the training that we have. I think things are also changing in people, which I think is really interesting. At the beginning of the pandemic, this question of reciprocation came up so strong. People would say to me, I will absolutely never accept anything from anybody if I cannot pay them back and have it be clean.

Chris:

Yeah. You write about this, I think you say your goal is complicating reciprocity, and I’m wondering what this is?

Cassie:

Yeah. This is .the easiest way to talk about confronting capitalist practices. It’s so much easier to just give something that we pretend is equal to what we receive, and that is much easier for us than it is to just receive and then have to figure it out without feeling a kind of shame-filled debt. I think most people at the beginning of this project, the first response is also a problem with capitalism. People are like, I don’t have time for this. The second thing was, I will never give something. I mean I will never receive something without giving something back because I don’t want to be a burden to anybody. I think these things, they’re really big and they seem sort of simple, but I think they’re also things that are mutable and are changing.

We’ve really seen in the last three years of organizing this how much people have changed. Now things have gotten harder for a lot of people and maybe we’ve had to get a little bit more acclimated to asking for support and being okay with not being able to give it back right away. We don’t get confronted in those ways, so I think it’s interesting how… I really believe that as we change, we will change also the nature of capitalism. I don’t know that we’re going to bring it down just simply by changing our behaviors, but it’s really interesting to watch it mutate and to take ownership over it a little bit.

Chris:

Yeah, that’s great. Trust is paramount to The Hologram, and I’m wondering if you could say more about trust and how you described how everything’s going to work out, works out.

Cassie:

Yeah. It’s going to work out. Yeah. I think that the interesting thing that we’ve learned probably since that book came out is that trust is a big idea that we don’t always fully understand. There’s a lot of pressure on trust. When we first started teaching hologram workshops and courses and we would talk about trust, just by talking about trust, people would flip out and be like, I don’t trust you. I don’t trust this. Why should I trust this? We’re like, no, no, no. We’re talking about trust because we want to understand what trust means. I think you could do this project at a certain level without trust and it might still be okay. I think that is interesting. There’s a certain amount of this project that I feel is meant to challenge this hyper individuation that we have experienced where my problems are so different and so heavy, but also I need to keep them hidden and private, so I have to really trust the people around me to be able to hold it.

I think meanwhile, a lot of us are going through stuff that’s very interrelated. Many of our struggles are very parallel, so I’m not sure that the same level of trust is needed if we assume that we are in this together struggling with quite similar stuff. Of course, it’s useful and maybe trust grows over time, but I don’t know if in this project you have to really build the trust before you do the practice. The practice might produce trust. I also don’t know if trust is necessarily the big goal that we think that it is. I think a lot can happen before you trust somebody, and it’s just a matter of maybe trusting yourself. I think that this is the confusing part, but I don’t know what I said about everything will work out, but…

Chris:

You write in the book when embarking on The Hologram, there are toxic lessons to unlearn. I’m wondering if you could share what those are.

Cassie:

Yeah. I think the biggest one is it seems to me to be like what I’ve been saying about feeling like each of us is carrying something so unbelievably heavy that it would be better if we just took care of it ourselves. It makes it really hard to share a lot of stuff. I know I write in the book about how hard it is to share, actually hardcore share resources, but I actually think it starts with even sharing ourselves. There’s something that we’ve made into an automatic value that we really believe we should withhold ourselves because something about us is just too heavy and too dark to share with other people. That’s why we really need professionals to safeguard us almost from ourselves spilling into other people’s lives or something. I think that’s one toxic lesson. I think there’s just so many about believing that we must be productive. Our work determines our value, that it’s not what we are, but what we accomplish.

There’s so much of this that it feels like a never ending list, but I have to say, we have had such an interesting time. We recently been having some meetings with people that have been practicing The Hologram for a couple of years. A lot of us have been doing it for two or three years now, very consistently. I really think actually some of this stuff can shift. It’s really incremental and it’s really subtle, but the sense of having your health and well-being very much reliant on the health and well-being of the people around you, it really affects everything. Also knowing that your friends are taken care of, which in the system, if it works as it’s supposed to, your friend, the people around you are taken care of. It does cut off the sense of personal responsibility and individual heroism that can be really live in the world of care and activism and all that. I think it does start to shift things for us over time. Yeah

.Chris:

You write that if all our crises are connected, then all our wishes are conspiring. I like that. I’m wondering if you could say more about the role of the wish in The Hologram.

Cassie:

Yeah. Well, I just remember very strongly, I had done this survey of lots of my friends maybe around 2015 or 2016 about money. It brought up a lot of conversations with my friends about their wishes, the wishes that they’re embarrassed to have about money. We’re talking about poor people; poor people that are working just to barely afford rent and how much guilt they had for being like, I just wish I could have a house where I could grow food and have people come visit me and not have to worry about losing it all the time, and then they would feel guilty about it. I think the important thing to me was seeing that wish… we don’t live in a perfect society, and the wish to own property is not like if you could do anything in any world, you would own property. It’s in these conditions, you might want stability, you might want something you could share with other people, you might want a relationship with nature.

None of these things are bad. It’s just that the way we have to get it is shitty, but that’s not something that we can change individually. I think the interesting thing about The Hologram is that over time you begin to become very familiar with what the person that you’re looking at really wants. I think the things that most of us want are pretty basic and pretty common. I think the more you see somebody else over time, I’m in a couple people’s holograms for the last couple of years… we all just really actually want access to good food and water and a place to support each other. We want to be creative and useful. It’s pretty simple, so I feel like this is the thing is that when our wishes produce shame, there’s way less likelihood that we’re going to talk about it, realize the wishes are common, and then look for ways to collectively seek out those wishes. The Hologram then, if it’s based in wishes, it’s way different than being based in the idea that we’re going to fix somebody or fix something.

I think in every hologram, I think we at some point have to remind ourselves that we are not problems that we’re going to solve. We are people who have wishes and we are going to help each other to seek out those wishes and know that when one per person begins to actually get closer to what they want, we all do.

Chris:

Wonderful.

Cassie:

This is it. It’s just so different than how biomedicine or anything seems to work, which I relate more to patriarchy and stuff that we’re just constantly trying to quickly figure out the way to plug the sinking ship, but if we actually just stop seeing each other as sinking ships and just see the whole sea is a bit weird, but if we tie the boats together, I don’t know.

Chris:

Yeah. That’s great.

Cassie:

Yeah, that’s the wish thing.

Chris:

All right. You mentioned this a little earlier about how capitalism produces a sort of time poverty, but you write about how time, and how the hologram wastes your time. I’m wondering if you could say more about that.

Cassie:

Yeah. I think going into The Hologram believing it’s going to waste your time is the best bet because it actually can then. At the beginning of the project, before the pandemic started, people would literally laugh at me in workshops and say, this is such a cute idea, but it will never work because I would never have time for something like this. We’re talking maybe an hour and a half every three months for most of us, but if we go into it just believing we’re going to waste our capitalist time, we’re going to waste the time that we would normally be productive to do this other thing, then the expectations are low, and then your mind can be blown at what is possible in 90 minutes.

I think there’s something about the form that means that time goes by really quickly. There’s a lot of depth, and there’s a shift in the energy of the group that’s very material. People really feel and look different at the end. So often when I hear people say, I don’t really feel like doing this right now, I don’t want to sit in front of the computer, I just want to be alone, if you do it anyway, it’s kind of medicinal. Yeah, but you have to somehow buy yourself the way in. I think I’ve had different relationships to this question of wasting time over the last couple of years, but I think the really cool thing about time in this is that we can’t really plan very much, but the one thing I know about the future is that I will have my hologram. I’m sure of it. I don’t know where I will live in five years. I don’t know how, but as long as there is an internet or a phone, I will have my hologram. That is really interesting.

I feel like it’s really worth having something that you know you can plan on when you know that a lot of other stuff is pretty shaky around you. That is an interesting relationship to time, I think. We did a LARP at one point with people that were doing The Hologram, and we just did this thing where it was imagine that you had your hologram that you have now, but you have it for the next 30 years until the year 2050. We LARPed as ourselves in 2050 to try to figure out what would’ve changed about us and our communities if we would’ve had this kind of sustained support. Yeah. It’s kind of hard to imagine a lot of other infrastructure and what its state would be in 2050, but there are certain things that we can see how the hologram shifts us and know that there’s certain things that maybe we can look forward to in that time.

Chris:

That’s great. Okay. In some recent writing, you’ve written recently about the other energy crisis, which I really identified with quite honestly. I wonder if you could say more about that.

Cassie:

I’m so glad that it was useful. Yeah. It really feels like… I wrote this article called Anxiety’s Nature Defending Itself. For me, it was such an important exploration of my own experience of anxiety and trying to really look at what it’s doing. I had this feeling that I have never had the chance to really articulate, which was just that I think anxiety isn’t just bad, but it can produce an effect of the perfect conditions for more work. I think it’s just so interesting how my anxiety a lot of times comes from the fact that I don’t know what to look to anymore as the sacred things that I believe will always be there that can calm my brain and allow my nervous system to slow down, because when I picture some of the places that I love the most, they’re burned up and gone. That’s going to happen more and more. Meanwhile, my anxiety goes up and up and up. Then it’s so funny because I’m working more than ever, and that seems like a very weird response to that anxiety.

I think this other energy crisis is not knowing what to do with this anxiety energy that we have and not knowing how to really listen to it and see what it wants. I have a quite amazing acupuncturist who constantly asks me what the anxiety is telling me. I’m like, I don’t know, because it feels like such an overwhelming experience. It’s too much to translate, but this article, I think interestingly, was a way to begin to slow down enough to really look at it. Not that I still know what the anxiety is saying, but just sort of knowing I do have a deep feeling that it is telling us something. I don’t think it’s just saying to rest. I don’t think it’s just saying to stop. It might be saying though to stop living or working in the ways that we are working. That’s tough shit to deal with as an individual. What am I supposed to do? How am I going to pay rent if I don’t do that? It’s not something you can really change alone. I think that’s the other energy crisis.

Chris:

You also had another recent project, The Holographic School of Social Medicine, which was a four-month experimental care project located at a bar in Berlin. I’m wondering if you could say more about that project.

Cassie:

Yeah. We have two more weekends at this cool little bar. Basically, The Hologram, it became something that a lot of people practiced, and many of my best friends had taken it up. Some of them became organizers for The Hologram. I moved to Berlin partially because I had so many friends here that were doing The Hologram and we were interested in organizing and experimenting with what would it mean to really be together in space and see what we could lift off in a city. A big question was if we could make the project more physical. If we had a physical place, what would change about it? The answer is everything. The School of Social Medicine, it’s a pretty big collaboration with Magda, Florence Freitag, and we now have a whole lot of collaborators.

What we did was we just started by having a table where people could come every Thursday and just talk about The Hologram. Then somebody started coming a lot and we began to talk about how would we actually begin to incorporate the practice and see what that’s like in physical space without it being a workshop, so we started to offer a hologram a week with strangers, a facilitated session, and then those people would do the hologram and then stay after and come to the bar and have a drink and talk about it. Then it was too many people, so we started having two holograms a week, and then those people would all stay after. That meant we needed more facilitators, so we had to raise up some more facilitators.

Then we decided, well, actually there’s a lot of people in this group that are either professional caregivers or healers or whatever. Most of us actually believe in an anti-capitalist way of sharing information and practices, so we started to do skill shares with political storytelling about where different healing practices come from. We learned the five point acupuncture in the ear that was developed by the Young Lords and the Black Panthers in New York in the 70s. We did a bunch of studying about where that came from and what that struggle was like. Then we learned how to do the NoDa protocol so we could do it to other people.

It’s become quite funny because it’s a bunch of punks in a bar talking about the hologram, talking about strategizing around the hologram. Who do we want to offer it to? What’s next, but also with needles in their ear ears, and sometimes somebody’s doing craniosacral work, and it’s quite funny. I think there’s something really cool about it because it’s almost actually like the original clinic in Greece; a place for a kind of non-hierarchical care distribution. People come off the street, people come to our events, and then they end up really staying. The goal of this project was to somehow create a community that could do a bigger project next time. I think that we did. We ended up with a pretty big community. I think now in the fall, we’ll get another space and try it again, so it’s very exciting.

Chris:

Yeah. Wonderful. What are the future projects you’re planning? A couple more questions for you. Anything planned?

Cassie:

Yeah. I’m just experimenting with exhibitions. I think it’s totally lame at the end of the world to do exhibitions, but I learned so much in doing it. I just have an exhibition up now and I’m going to have another one in Norway in the fall.

Chris:

Wonderful.

Cassie:

These are just little moments where I get to basically write an essay in space and then have people go in it and talk to me about it. In some way I’m so embarrassed to have an exhibition in the apocalypse, and in some ways I’m just so grateful because I think you can only do so much writing alone in your room, even if you’re doing all the social learning in the world. I’m such a believer in a social process and actually having rituals so that some of these ideas can be seen and expressed in different forms.

Chris:

Totally agree.

Cassie:

Yeah. It’s really useful. I work with Berlin versus Amazon, and we just released an amazing video because Jeff Bezos, just agreed to some of our demands if he wants Amazon to be in Berlin. We made this video about it, and it’s kind of gone viral, and we’re just working with that and trying to keep Amazon out of Berlin.

There’s a million projects on the go, but I think maybe my next big project will be that I would really like to write another book that comes after The Hologram about what happens when people do have long-term anti-capitalist care, especially in the particular moment that we’re in, what that looks like. I’m a cynic, so it’s hard to say this, but it’s kind of a good news book a little bit because I think we actually now have the data that shows that this makes big changes. A small change of habit like this makes really big changes in people’s lives. We would love to be able to sync this data up with a social scientist or something and begin to present it to different groups of people at a larger scale so that they could have access to the tool and just begin to use it how they want it. I think lots of stuff is happening.

Chris:

That’s great. Last question for you. What books, films, ideas, thinkers, et cetera, what’s capturing your attention these days?

Cassie:

Yeah. My brain is totally lost on the name, so I’ll think of the… Doris Lessing. I just read this amazing book by Doris Lessing called The Good Terrorist, which is an amazing, maybe one of the best, most interesting books about a character that I’ve ever read about an activist who has really, really complex motivations that you would never expect. This would’ve taken place in the 70s in London, or 60s. It is an amazing book about what anarchy really looks like as an emotional and internalized practice, really a practice. It’s super weird.

Then I’m almost finished with the second book in this two part series by Adrienne Maree Brown called The Grievers. I love when Adrienne Maree Brown writes fiction. It is totally amazing, and it’s about basically a pandemic that only affects Black people in Detroit. I started reading it kind of in the middle of a lockdown, one of the last lockdowns, and now the second part just came out. It actually involves organizing in the apocalypse in a way that is very… it’s not super granular, but there’s enough of a sketch of a possibility that’s so cool. It’s making me pretty happy.

Then I have a bunch of friends that have just produced really amazing work. A really good friend of mine is just publishing a book in the same series as The Hologram came out with called On Cuddling. This is just like, yeah, it comes from this series, just a really, really incredible book about… the subtitle is called Squeezed to Death by The Racial Embrace, and really thinking about cuteness, race and asphyxiation in a way that is beyond anything that I’ve ever been able to think about before. Then I would say a really good friend of mine has a very, very amazing band called Magda and the Aliens that I’m listening to all the time.

Chris:

How do people find you if they want to track you and see more of your work, what you’re doing, learn more about The Hologram?

Cassie:

I think in a weird way at the moment, my Substack, Feminist Economics department on Substack is a really good one. I just got a new website made and I have not populated it yet, so I think probably my Substack and my Instagram are both really good.

Chris:

Cassie, thank you very much for making the time and explain The Hologram.

Cassie:

Yeah, thank you so much.

Recorded on June 25th, 2023 for the Radical Therapist Podcast. Some editing for continuity.