On going back to the beginning + winning in the apocalypse

This is a text exploring the meaning of success in the apocalypse. What does it mean to win if we aren't shooting for growth, profit or other forms of escalation, and instead we look towards slow, steady and meaningful change? For Cassie, the completion of cycles is very significant in projects, but there is often no way to talk about or mark these moments. This text follows the development of The Hologram as an 8 year long project (and going) and its path back to its roots. Warning: A small and meaningful experience of success in the apocalypse is described here.

When I talk about The Hologram publicly, I always talk about where it comes from. And now, so does everyone else who presents it. This is a part of the practice. For nearly 5 years, I and we have always said ‘it's really important where things come from’, but I never really knew the deeper significance of this phrase, even though I am pretty sure it came from me.

Recently I met two collaborators and friends, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova and Maro Pantezidou, in Greece, where the people and the clinic that inspired The Hologram project all reside. We were there to celebrate the new Greek (collective, cultural and linguistic) translation of the book I had originally published with Pluto Press in 2020 called ‘The Hologram: Feminist Peer to Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future’. This translation project was organized by Maro, and the book was published and translated with Christos Pallas at Periplaneta Books.

Of all the book launches we've ever had, I was most excited to go to Thessaloniki, to revisit the clinic that was the home of the practice that changed my life, my work and all my relationships. I didn’t know what it would mean to launch the book there, and to revisit the story that I and we have been narrating in hundreds of Holographic conversations, presentations, and workshops for the past 8 years. The story This is the story of The Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki, and how I heard a rumor about their endeavour to give free, non-hierarchical care in response to a debt crisis.

The people at the clinic (called Kia in Greek) have been working together for about a decade on something called The Integrative Model. This model invites a person (called an “incomer” and not a patient) to be seen by a practicing doctor, a therapist, and a volunteer/social worker at the same time. These three people ask about all parts of the person's life, outer, and inner worlds, in a collective practice in a tiny room with lots of affectionate seriousness, play and focus. They have been practicing and organizing the Integrative Model together through assemblies, with so much precision and learning, for so long. I really look up to them for what they do and how they do it.

We have basically taken the practice they do in their clinic, and figured out how we can do this ourselves, with our friends. In many ways, this practice expands their wish for undoing hierarchy. The day of the book launch in Thessaloniki I was so nervous that I could barely see and I didn't know why. I felt there was a pressure and possibility in the moment of reconnecting with the people and the place that inspired the project. Would they appreciate the grandchild that they did not consent to produce?

At the event we sat at a long table, alongside Ewa a doctor and Margarita a dentist, and fellow activists and members of the team who work on the Integrative Model. It was such a relief to hear, after I had just presented about The Hologram for ten minutes with Maro translating, that Margarita thought we had more in common and more to discuss than she ever could have expected. That night, and the following night, we stayed up into the early hours talking about the two models. We were two collectives using the same social technology in different ways, debating and learning from each other. It felt like going home, if home is a place where highly critical, very experienced, collectivists gather and organize care beyond what capitalism can dream.

Returning to this particular origin of the project was always a wish of mine. When I met Maro in 2020 in some online events, we immediately connected over this wish— that somehow we both felt the strong impulse to bring the project back to the people who inspired it. This wish was always written into the project, and returning the project to its origins felt like the end of a cycle. There’s no word that represents the significance of this moment where you close a cycle in a project, though it certainly is a defining point. And like, what if life was defined by cycles instead of by years? Hey, you, can we do that after capitalism ends? I don’t think I trust linear time anymore to tell me where I am in life or what is important. I don’t know what to call this experience: a rare but actual success taking place in the apocalypse. Can I just call this our Grammy Award? If not, maybe it is my anti-institutional PhD or the birth of a more-than-human child? It feels important to name this moment in a world where most things that are rewarded, or that are supposed to be important are actually capitalist, patriarchal bullshit. This moment of going back to the beginning felt so significant, but there is no word for it in our reality that helps translate why or how it matters. I believe that we concluded the first full cycle of this big long project by going back to the beginning.

Every end has a million different beginnings, and every beginning produces a million different stories. Nothing is inevitable, but nothing is unpredictable. If we all stopped participating in linear time, focusing on moving forward with such anxious and fearful momentum, what would happen? What if we focused on our relationship to cycles, orf how we work with the conditions we are born into, and how to actually leave the place (earth) better than we found it?

Ok so, why is it important to go back to the beginning?It seems kind of obvious that you go back to the beginning of a project to revisit what the original need or wish was, and if it was met. It feels normal in a goal oriented world. And yet I feel that I need to do it, and it isn't just capitalism breathing down my neck, telling me to take what I've come for. For me it's a spiritual practice, to go back to the original need, wish or desire that defined why I or we started working on whatever we are working on right now. In this way, my past self checks in on my current self, and we figure out what the plan is.

When I go back to the beginning of any project, whether it is a relationship, an art project, an experiment, or a phase of life, I find it really interesting to remember where I was and what I wanted or needed from that project at the beginning. And then, I also like to remember what the needs of the world were at that time.

Each project comes from an idea, but that idea comes out of a real life situation in the world: a problem, a pain, an unfulfilled need, a lonely person outside the subway, a crack in the sidewalk. When I started The Hologram, I lived in California. I had just lost my dad, ended a relationship, lost my housing, ran out of money, and lost faith in doing work in the art world. I had spent a year digging a hole in the backyard of my Oakland apartment, without growing anything in the soil. I worked on many projects with anti-debt activist groups during the day, catered for elite assholes at night, and there was an incredible drought in California that we were pretending not to notice. Though I had many friends, I don't think I had a very easy time asking for help, and I sustained my energy and self worth by anxiously pleasing people and by making myself useful. I was a lone wolf living in the US with no health insurance, the year after my dad sacrificed his life to avoid medical debt after being abandoned by the privatized medical insurance system (yes, the one who Luigi took revenge on) and its all encompassing logic of care for profit.I was looking for good news outside of the debt system when I heard a rumor that there was a free clinic in Greece that was made in response to sovereign debt; that they aimed to give medical, social and emotional care to one person at a time for free. I was trying to feel what it was like to be in a world where there was enough care for everyone, where the care wasn't dependent on money, competition or individual heroes, and where I didn't feel so alone and personally responsible.

What is the need, wish, or desire behind the project you are working on right now?

Can you remember the original impetus, the taste in your mouth, the hunger or curiosity?

What did you need right then at the birthplace?

What did the world need?

One of my favorite authors, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, writes indigenous theory in circles, through telling stories with all her human and non-human relations, of Indigenous Resurgence. AS WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE is a theory written in a full cycle, in a book, in a circle and it demands an end to capitalism, colonialism and all the cycles of domination that keep anyone alive from flourishing, starting with Indigenous people.

The Hologram also comes from the place that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is from, in Anishinaabe Territory in what is now called Canada. As The Hologram grew into a larger social project, I lived in Thunder Bay, Canada. During the day, I ran workshops and gave talks about The Hologram. At night I was a part of an Indigenous Feminist patrol with and for Anishinaabe people and settlers to escape from police violence and extreme settler colonialism together.

Some of the practices within The Hologram are very literal translations of practices that we used within this direct action support work. One of my favorite parts of The Hologram, the Community of Practice, is an interpretation of a talking circle we did within our patrol group to work with difficult feelings. In the circle, everyone in our group was invited to speak as much as they liked, and to pass it on to the next person when they felt their words were complete. We went in a circle, and we let ourselves explore what was the beginning, or the root, of the conflict, and the beginning or root of our work. It emerged. In The Hologram, this is done online or in person, also in a circle. One person at a time talks as long as they want about a tension or question they have about The Hologram practice, and then they invite the next person to do so, until everyone speaks. In the second round, we speak in the same order as in the first round, now inviting each person to respond to anything they heard from the others, with care and curiosity and without expertise. Community of Practice is a way that people who use The Hologram can connect with others and it takes the practice out of the realm of "cheap therapy replacement” and into the realm of a new form of social movement.

In some ways, The Hologram has also begun to produce direct action support work in the spirit of the patrol that I was a part of. I think we may then be entering a new stage, one where we can now take on the spirit of our second parent (knowing that our parents are always a place and its people, that people are land, and that land is always ultimately our parent and our teacher). As more people practice The Hologram for longer periods of time, we can see more and more hologrammas making use of the stability they experience in The Hologram to become involved in risky direct action work to support others, to take risks for the lives of people affected by toxic power, near and far.

What is important? 

Why are we doing this?

Is this good?

What's good?

How does this relate to the current state of the world?

How does this produce life and not distraction?

Does this project create or destroy energy? The day of the book launch in Thessaloniki I was so nervous that I could barely see and I didn't know why. There's something about going back to the beginning–to meet the ancestors and to touch the memories–that takes away a lot of illusions and confusions. And maybe that's what we in the flat white dimension (where we drink strong coffee and do vigorous exercise to quiet the anxiety we have about the burning planet so we can continue to work and pay rent) are learning right now: how to get rid of the illusions of what is or was important, and to replace this idea with what we sense is actually needed in order to continue to survive in the chaotic mess that is our global reality.It's really scary to let go of illusions. Especially if illusions are the thing that allows you to continue to live and make money and pay rent. I don't think we can do it alone.

Before The Hologram became a social project in 2020, when I was doing more traditional artwork, I produced an exhibition for a curator named Magda Hartelova at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Prague. We took a big round table that was used for a prior exhibition. It was going to be thrown away, and so we painted it matte black, and we hung it on a giant white wall and lit it from the back. It created a cheap optical illusion of a big hole in the wall, a portal. If you stood far away from it at the opposite end of the gallery and squinted, maybe you could believe that you could go through it. The exhibition texts explained that a lot of people already did go through that hole. If you looked down on the floor while you were standing and staring at the hole, you could see something that said: How much time can you afford to put into an illusion?

I think there's something about going back to where things come from that also has to do with showing gratitude and respect for the people and places that are at the root of what we're doing, and some of these things might not be pleasant. Maybe you're doing a project about care because you didn't experience any. Maybe you're doing a project like The Hologram, because people had to invent a system for care when there wasn't enough due to colonial debts inIn a global system that profits off of death.There's something about going back to the root of things that has to do with a kind of awareness of where things come from, and that there is always more at the root than we can ever see. But from here, we can get gratitude for the people, places, and ideas that allowed us to grow the way we did. In the case of The Hologram, we can be angry at a debt based society and grateful for the people who opened clinics in the face of that system.When I lived in Thunder Bay, I remember going to a talk at the library by Erica Violet Lee, an Nêhiyaw, Irish poet. She sat on a wood chair at a wood table and explained that everything takes longer when you wonder what trees the table is made of, and who made it, and then thanked them all.

When we visited the Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki in 2016, I went with a friend who was having a really hard time. On the trip, they had been quite hard on me. After that trip, they continued to have a really hard time, and we ended the friendship. It was a huge turning point in my life. When I went back to the Thessaloniki in 2024, eight years later, some of the people at the clinic asked me about that old friend and I told them that I don't know how they are. There's a lot of relationships, conflicts and stories at the root of this project, and of every project, and some are dark. What does it mean to acknowledge that a project about friendship is not built out of perfect relationships and kindness?There's something about the way we think and obsess about the unplannable, uncontrollable future that means we often don't have that much time to linger in the past. Sometimes it feels gratuitous to look back. Sometimes it's just not possible to really deeply consider the roots of things. But what would change if we did?

When I was getting ready to go to Greece, I had lunch with a friend, and they asked me what I was excited about experiencing in Greece. I explained that I was going back to the people who originally inspired The Hologram project, and how it feels like the closing of a cycle. For the first time I mapped out how excited and nervous I was, to be closing this cycle. I didn't really know what it meant to go back to the root, or if it really meant anything, but I looked in my friend's eyes and they were all red and filled with water. My first thought was: Oh, my God. I want to be your friend forever. My second thought was: Oh, maybe this is important. LOL

LAB question: What is the original need, wish, or desire behind the project you are working on right now?