The Hologram, climate crisis, climate activism and climate exhaustion

This workshop will focus on acknowledging and supporting the personal and collective health effects of participation in climate activism.

The session is not reserved for people directly involved in climate activism, but open for everyone who feels exhausted, sorrowful, or worried about the future. We will try to apply the The Hologram practice to understanding widespread exhaustion, grief and conflict connected to climate crisis, social organizing and direct action. What would change if we placed collective care at the center of our movements?

The Hologram is a peer to peer protocol practiced from beds and couches around the world. One part social practice, one part technology of revolution, and one part feminist science fiction come to life, The Hologram is a lightweight, replicable, autonomous protocol for human cooperation which produces a rare form of de-institutionalized stability that comes from seeing and being seen, caring and being cared for and supporting while being supported, in the long term. By making this form of viral communal stability, we believe that hologrammers and their communities may be able to use their stability to produce new ways of living that don't rely on or reproduce the toxic systems that are killing us. 

Spread over four sessions, we will practice The Hologram together to explore new perspectives on topics such as collective care, climate exhaustion, the conversation on Palestine, and difficult feelings. Every session will be led by founder of The Hologram, Berlin-based artist Cassie Thornton, and takes 3 hours. Please feel free to attend the entire series or join as many sessions as possible for you.

The workshop is open for all students.

About Cassie Thornton

Cassandra 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). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

About OIKOS

The climate is changing. As a result, human life and how we take care of each other and of our world is also changing. The environmental crisis can, consequently, be understood a crisis of care. The research project “OIKOS. A Cultural Analysis of Care and Crisis in the 21st Century” will investigate the nexus of care and crisis through a cultural analysis of works of literature, visual and performance art. By focusing on the care practices of parenting, maintaining, and regenerating, OIKOS shifts the perspective from the existence of a warming planet to human existence on it.