The Hologram is a viral distribution system for non-expert healthcare. Its protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s wellbeing as therapeutic in itself.
This project was developed by a group of exhausted and anxious US artists, organizers and healers who experienced housing insecurity, inconsistent healthcare and massive debt, forced to scrounge and scam for care in between gigs.
The Hologram now lives on by different names with and through these people in venues all over the world. This workshop is aimed at anyone who is interested, and whose precariousness and fear of the (non-)future is the most reliable part of their life.
It is especially aimed at those whose waged or unwaged work is to transform the imagination (including artists, organizers, teachers, and activists). The wish is for all participants to connect to an “intentional community in exile” by learning to trust others in the same situation, and to rely on them for help navigating a world based on the capitalist sabotage of our health and thriving.
In a series of four free evening sessions, we will practice and discuss social skills, values, and priorities that are central to the Hologram model. These are powers that we may have forgotten or sold while fighting for our individual financial survival.
The course will involve a collective exploration of participants’ health as a common phenomenon. Each person will leave the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram and to network it with others.
Please note The Hologram talk and workshops are now taking place online due to pandemic restrictions. Contact info@furtherfield.org if you need any further information or assistance.
About the course co-facilitators
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes 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. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She has worked in close collaboration with freelance curators and producers including Taraneh Fazeli, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Dani Admiss, Amanda Nudelman, Misha Rabinovich, Caitlin Foley, and Laurel Ptak. Her projects, invited and uninvited, have appeared at (or in collaboration with) Transmediale Festival for Media Arts, San Francisco MoMA, West Den Haag, Moneylab, Swissnex San Francisco, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Dream Farm Commons, Furtherfield, Gallery 400, Strike Debt Bay Area, Red Bull Detroit, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Flux Factory, Bemis Center for the Arts, Berliner Gazette and more.
Lita Wallis is a youth worker, organiser, and informal educator based in London. Whether in work or her personal life, Lita has spent much of her time experimenting with different shapes of supportive relationships (eg. cooperatives, triangles, flows and webs.) She is still working on ways to build sustainable support networks that challenge isolating social norms, and then how to commit to them in a social context that is so hostile to putting down roots. Four years ago she and two friends made a lifelong commitment to The Tripod, a platonic support system, which aims to provide much of the financial, emotional and housing support that many people end up relying on couple relationships for. She hopes to bring some learning from this experience, plus some seeds of inspiration from her work with young people and her avid sci-fi habit, to set founding Hologram members fourth in good stead.
The Hologram is part of Furtherfield’s three-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
2020 is the year of Love Machines, nurturing living and machine systems for mutual care and respect on earth and beyond.
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