ANTI FEAR ASSEMBLY: Afraid of Our Own Powers

Workshop Description

Cassie Thornton of the Feminist Economics Department gave a short lecture followed by a series of facilitated conversations and exercises related to The Hologram, a mythoreal collective peer-to-peer health project. In this workshop we discussed why a new world is possible when we ask for and organize our own help. We used the social technology called The Hologram to interrogate this question theoretically, and personally. The Hologram, based on the understanding that all our crises are connected and everyone is a little sick, is a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practiced from couches all over the world. Three non-expert participants create a three-dimensional “hologram” of a fourth participant’s physical, psychological and social health, and each becomes, in turn, the focus of three other people’s care in an expanding network.

This health distribution system is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result is the construction of a robust network of multi-dimensional health, collectively oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive racial capitalism.

The Hologram is a project held up and held together through many collaborations and different forms of support. We are currently receiving multiple forms of support from these entities: Furtherfield, CreaTures, and pirate care.

Additional reading:

Regarding the Greek Social Solidarity Clinics

*The above essay is also available as part of this collection of essays, FOR HEALTH AUTONOMY: HORIZONS OF CARE BEYOND AUSTERITY—REFLECTIONS FROM GREECE, by the CareNotes Collective

Relevant websites: thehologram.xyzfeministeconomicsdepartment.com

Questions to Consider

Why is it so hard to ask for help?
What do you fear will happen to you if you do ask for help?
What will happen to the person you ask for help from?
Do you feel like you deserve help?
Do you feel like you shouldn’t need help?
What becomes vulnerable when you ask for help?
What becomes strong when you ask for help?
Who is your role model in asking for help?
What does asking for help create?
What does asking for help destroy?
Whose help do you want?
Whose help do you not want?
What kind of help feels good?
What kind of help feels bad?
What is good help to you?
How do you ask for help when you don’t even know what help you need?
What if your needs are indescribable, because you’ve never described them before?
What if you have never gotten good help before?
What if you have gotten very bad help before?
What if you have seen other people receive bad help?
What if you have trained your whole life to be self sustaining?
What if you are afraid of help?
What if you are afraid of needing anything?
What if you are afraid of being in a crisis that is so big that it is indescribable?
What if you are in a crisis that is so big that it is indescribable?
How do you prioritize yourself?
How do you prioritize everyone else?
How do you know where you end and where they begin?
How do you know where they end and the economy begins?
How do you know where the economy ends and you begin?
How do you not put up boundaries, just because that’s what you’ve always done?
How do you know which boundaries are no longer serving you?
How do you know which boundaries are reproducing carcerality and which ones you still need?
How do you have boundaries low enough that you can experiment with trust?
How can you safely experiment with trust with hope?
How do you have hope that something is possible, even if you’ve never seen it before?
How do you learn to trust people when you aren’t sure you trust yourself?
How do you trust yourself when you live with a set of conditions you can’t trust?
How do you trust your conditions when they are constantly changing?
How do you ask for help when so much help is needed everywhere?

HOMEWORK: WHAT DO YOU NEED?

ALL OUR CRISES ARE INTERCONNECTED 

ABOUT HOST

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who creates a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Her current project is described in her forthcoming book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, coming out from Pluto Press this July. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, from Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/

ABOUT HEKLER ASSEMBLY

HEKLER ASSEMBLY is a transnational space for art and cultural workers to share, discuss and collectively imagine new ways of instituting based on the principles of self-organizing, community care, critical thinking, political education, distribution of resources, and healing. With alternating hosts, we share practical, historical, and theoretical knowledge about collaborative, pedagogical, and governing models established in response to shifting regimes, colonial and neoliberal violence. We question and learn about radical hospitality and conviviality, eco-centered community organizing, instituting, and art practices that showcase the symptoms we need to transform. Most importantly we continue asking what can be the role of arts now and in the future. Assembly is envisioned as an open collaborative process that includes reading groups, conversations with practitioners, and the ANTI FEAR series. 

ANTI FEAR series are initiated in collaboration with New York-based artist and neurologist Sonja Blum. It is an evolving collective practice aiming in this time of crisis and change for a space decidedly between cultural/theoretical dialogue and therapeutic discourse. It is envisioned as a space in which we bring privately held fears into community with others' fears to embrace vulnerability and open collective experiments in community-building, trust, reciprocal care, and re-imagining the commons. This work is explored through poetry, movement/body work, breathing exercises and meditations, readings, lectures and other practices that untie repressive knots and make us feel empowered, imaginative and hopeful.