I INITIALLY APPROACHED CASSIE THORNTON, AN ARTIST AND ACTIVIST, TO SEE IF SHE'D BE INTERESTED IN SPEAKING WITH EMERGE ABOUT HER WORK ON THE HOLOGRAM. When Cassie responded that their practice is to do collective rather than solo interviews, we set up a conversation with her and her collaborator Florence Freitag, and Maro Pantazidou contributed asynchronously. As you’ll read, doing a group interview both aligned with the collective’s ethos and became an experiential mode of understanding coherence through the lens of distributed action. 

Their newsletter recently described The Hologram as ‘a caretaking tool designed by a group of artists and activists, inspired by the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece. In this project, the person who articulates their needs and asks for support is our teacher and the expert of their own experience.’ I encourage you to first watch this video demonstrating the practice. You can also check out their most recent publication, It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway!, published in June 2025 by Thick Press, curated by Cassie and Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova.

The conversation ranged from the experience of transitioning from artist- to collective-centered work, reframing the polycrisis as a ‘crisis of care’, the creation of the new Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin, how they conceive of ‘the commons’, and ‘retraining our sharing muscles’. The fundamental experiment of this work is to ask: how can we all get our needs met without going into ‘financial, social, spiritual, or ethical debt’ – and what kind of society would that look like as a result?

Leigh Biddlecome: I want to start with something our mutual friend Alessandra [Saviotti] wrote about you, Cassie. She said that when she got to know your work, it sounded like it ‘came from the future’—and that the future 'looked darker rather than brighter'. Does that still feel true for you? And Florence and Maro, when you’re working in the group, are you thinking about this darker future or do you feel like you’re already living in it?

Cassie Thornton: I think about this a lot. It feels like one of my main questions. It's probably more interesting to hear from Florence, but I’ve felt for a long time that my work—especially for people in the art world and academia—was about reminding them that things are not okay for most people. And if they’re not okay for most, eventually they won’t be okay for you either.

During the pandemic, I thought maybe I was out of a job because everyone had to face that reality: that things aren't okay, and they're not getting better. That anxiety and fear has driven me for a long time and underpinned all my projects, including the Hologram. 

I thought the Hologram would prepare us for this moment, and it’s already insufficient. The darkness I felt was inevitable— economic, environmental, social collapse—but we didn’t know how it would show up in our personal lives.

In some ways, the Hologram is working; in others, it’s not. I don't feel the same sense of dread, despite being in the polycrisis, or metacrisis. I actually have more hope, because the future has been exposed, and it's scary as fuck. And so now I feel like our job is to actually believe that something else is possible, and to prepare for that instead. It’s like moving from a lithium battery to solar power—getting energy from something less extractive.

Florence Freitag: I relate to that. When Leigh asked about the dark future, my first thought was: we’re already in it. But because of the kind of things we’re trying and building—this experiment that we’re doing on ourselves—I also see the future as brighter.

Working with the Hologram has taught me how to stay present. When I spiral into anxiety and fear, I can lose myself. So learning to live with the unknown has become our work. Stripping away layers of ourselves and learning what we truly need—that’s why I’m practicing now.

This experiment, where I show everything I have to this group I’m doing it with, teaches me how to face the unknown. That’s what makes it different from just individual work—it’s a collective process.

Maro Pantazidou: When I first came across The Hologram and Cassie’s work, I was feeling numbness – sociopolitically, I mean – because of this dark future and of the insufficiency of the tools we have to intervene in it. The Hologram, in both its premise and its practice, drew me in exactly because of how it connects the everyday with the big picture, the little things we can do for each other when we are feeling lost with the big things we can do together for a world collapsing.

In that sense, I’ve always felt that the Hologram, though it is insufficient as Cassie says,  opens a little path to connect present ways of relating with a future kind of community, and in doing so creates some coherence-in-action – which is exactly why I thought it was brilliant you wanted to talk to us. 

LB: I find it very compelling to hear how the process has changed you, and on a more general level what happens when people get involved in collective work. What does it look like when that process is happening together rather than alone?

Florence: It happens at different speeds. Sometimes I’m out in the world talking about how the Hologram works, but then I realize I haven’t practiced it myself in a while. We always say: practice it more than you talk about it.

I can be suspicious of anything that sounds like self-help…we’re not going on retreats [laughs]. And there's no linear path—it’s about continuity and holding each other through it. That’s what we’re experimenting with through the structures we're trying out, and how we check in with each other. It's different layers of friendship, intimacy, organising. We go out and come back in.

Maro: For me it has been really precious to feel that interweaving of friendship, intimacy and organising that Florence talks about and that we do through the Hologram assembly and broader network of organisers. I am based in Greece and together with other friends and conspirators, and with the Group for Another Medicine at the Thessaloniki Solidarity Social Clinic we have translated and published the book and are organising workshops on the practice. We might be doing things differently than the organisers in Germany or say the US, there is a lot of adaptation and distributive action in the Hologram but there is also a lot of support in all phases of putting something together. There is a threading of our needs and processes across countries and across humans which somehow remains both fluid and clear (most of the time!)

Cassie: The Hologram really has changed me—and my friends too. It’s hard to say where the change starts and ends. The world has changed, and we’ve had to adapt, becoming more collective as we’ve had less to rely on from institutions.

For me, a big shift has been moving from being seen as the inventor or center of the project to being one part of a collective. I was able to ‘disintegrate’ a lot of that kind of authority, or the ‘centeredness’ of my position. And so for me it really revealed just so much about what’s possible collectively that isn’t possible alone.  And I think that will probably be one of the crazy things of my lifetime, that I got to witness the difference between being recognized as an individual and the feeling of what else is possible through shedding that. And that texture is something I couldn’t have imagined five years ago (and it’s been really hard too!).

Another change I’ve seen is people breaking up with old structures—institutions, relationships, family roles. In Berlin, we even started a family abolition reading and action group. I think it was about realizing that we together had formed a structure of support using the Hologram which meant that we were no longer required to lean into structures that felt like they weren't working anymore. And I feel like that is happening a lot in a lot of different groups of people who are using it. 

That’s when we saw that if you use the Hologram as a collective tool—not as individual therapy—new things emerge. We’ve also created structures like the Casino for Social Medicine, which builds on this foundation and pushes it further.

LB: [The Casino is an ‘anticapitalist, collective café and bar for social medicine’ that opened in October 2024 in Neukölln, Berlin. Currently they have over 2000 subscribers on their Telegram channel.] How do you make sure that you’re not reproducing in the Casino the same power dynamics you're trying to dismantle?

Florence: For me, one of the biggest things was believing in each other. Being told, ‘You can try this, and you won’t be alone.’ That made it possible. The Casino started with some people who knew each other through the Hologram and others, who had never worked together, and it was messy—but we believed in it. That belief helped us organise and grow. It found a spot in Berlin that was empty in a certain way — people were hungry for a place where events are not policed and that brings together a lot of different struggles and collectives.

Cassie: The Casino is really an extension of what we learned in the Hologram. It started with just what we had—nothing more. And when we needed more, we’d find it. That meant no heroes, not reproducing certain forms of hierarchy. The structure allows people to come and go. Right now we have maybe 50 volunteers, with 6–12 people as the central organising team. It’s precarious, but flexible. That’s something we’ve learned from this collective work.

LB: Reading about this work and putting it through the lens of ‘coherence,’ I’m wondering how building ‘non-monetary common resources’ (using your language) has involved navigating through periods of incoherence within these processes?

Florence: My first thought is that the Casino is exactly this — a place where coherence and incoherence come together. It is volunteer-run, but at the end of the day it is also still a bar that needs to make money, and that's the constant contradiction we bump against. There are bills to pay and all the stuff that you do when you have a bar. It is placed within the capitalist system of the city, but tries to do something completely different and so we also bump against the limitations and dependencies this brings up.

Cassie: I'm going to go back to the Hologram here because the Hologram is built on a financial experiment that comes from an anti-debt movement. So it is the opposite of financialised or monetised (also, financialisation and monetisation are quite different). Financialisation is the process where social goods get turned into things that produce profit for shareholders. 

For many people in many societies, in order to get your basic needs met, you have to go into debt. And so the Hologram is an experiment in getting your needs met without going into debt, not in a financial, social, spiritual or ethical way. It’s really about finding ways to get your needs met from the people who are the closest to you, and making sure that their needs are met too in the process. 

We received foundation money after the first book [The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future] came out from Pluto. So then that money was the seed for inviting other people in to be able to take care of the project, to also use it in their own lives, and figure out how to organise it together. And so money was definitely a lever that allowed it to grow.

But I think it's a project mostly run by people who do not like and do not trust money, and instead choose to try to increase trust socially — so that we don't have to fear not having money because we have a social network or the capacity to get our needs met by asking for help or for using the resources that are around us.

These are less financialised forms of support. And I think that the building of a commons is happening very slowly. Building a commons does not disclude running a business, like the Casino for Social Medicine. Inside the cafe there is a banner that we made on the day we opened. In three or four languages it says: Needs are not scary. 

The Casino, and The Hologram are commons because even if they incorporate money, money is just one of the resources that flow through it. Money is not the energy of either of the projects, they are both projects that exist to fulfill shared needs with common (and sometimes borrowed or stolen) resources. Our work is to organise how we use and distribute those resources, and how we maintain those resources. In both The Hologram and Casino, I would say that the people and their energy are our primary resources, so we do an extra lot to maintain those resources since we are not primarily focused on using money as our energy or currency. 

In the Hologram, which is run by an assembly, there's a big question about how to use money now, because we don't have any anymore. We were able to use it for about five years, and now it's gone. We're now at this point where we're wondering, do we actually want money?

I think at the beginning there was a fear that money could contaminate a project. And I think in the process of talking about that for five years, I actually don't think we fear that anymore. I think it's just like money is one among many, many resources that we need.

Our commons is the free, open source practice of the Hologram, but also the values that we have and the way that we practice those values.

Maro: Yeah, we talk a lot about how we retrain our ‘sharing muscles’ (as Cassie writes in the book) for redistributing core resources. And that extends beyond money, to knowledge, energy and crucially – time! Actually, perhaps we don’t talk about it that much, but we learn a lot about it through practice. And time operates in funny and beautiful ways in our collective organising.

A special moment for me was when we launched the book in Thessaloniki, and Margarita our friend and collaborator from the Thessaloniki Social Clinic spoke about the evolution and circulation of struggles over time: how The Hologram has its roots in the practices of the Group for Another Medicine and how now it has become a living thing of its own. And perhaps in a few years, some of us will be sitting happily in the launch of another social technology which has been inspired by the Hologram, and this circulation is a form of commons and a source of coherence in itself. 

LB: Cassie, I read on your website that you’ve taught ‘feminist economics to yogis’.  How exactly did you do that? And how do you convince people who are primarily focused on ‘personal healing’ to want to do something in the wider world that's not just another ‘personal growth journey’?

Cassie: That’s basically my life’s work. I have this big wish to address that. And one way is to trick them by inviting them into a yoga class that I teach [laughs]. 

I feel like it's my job to melt the illusions, to break myself and other people out of their delusions. If we want things to change, that has to include the wealthy middle class — they’re also needed, we can’t just ignore them. And so I will go to their yoga studios, I will go to the hedge fund manager, I will show up in their meeting room, in corporate yoga class, and I will teach them mindfulness and I will remind them that the only real inner peace would come from universal housing and healthcare for all. It's a tactic, really.

How do I tackle people’s obsession with individual healing? I feel like it's a really creative process that involves understanding how they're using language, how they're programmed, and then figuring out how to use those words to enter their safe spaces and remind them that they are neither alone or in competition with humanity.

Florence: When you do that, Cassie, you bring people to feel such uncomfortable things, and that’s a kind of discomfort they really don't want to feel. This is in contrast to the ‘self-help style’ yoga studios which are mostly about coming in and leaving the ‘problems’ of the world outside. Cassie’s bringing it in, and then something happens: you move your discomfort around in your body and learn how to stay with it. In a way it’s to learn how to not crumble in the face of a scary unknown future, injustice or conflict. And this also is, a bit like Maro said, a muscle we need to build. 

Cassie:  And it’s not to punish them on the way to liberation! I’m trying to bring them in.

Florence: And the same happens with the Hologram. We don’t just want health workers and activists to receive this kind of care — what would happen if everybody, including the wealthy, had their needs met through something like the experiment of the Hologram, including our parents, teachers, social workers, gardeners, fire fighters, cleaners…? How would that change the world?

Cassie: Actually, I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of framing all the big metacrises—capitalism, colonialism, climate breakdown—not just as separate issues, but as part of a broader care crisis.

Instead of using terms like capitalism, colonialism, climate collapse, ‘polycrisis’, what if we said we’re in a care crisis? That shift in framing could change everything– especially if it helped us ask the question: what would it take for all caregivers to be cared for?

Leigh Biddlecome: I’d love to put you all in a room with the male theorists of the polycrisis and hear that conversation…

Florence: We can send them all to Masculiminal! This is the name of one of the Hologram projects, initiated by Lark Lyra Lou Hill. It’s a reading/discussion group and Hologram practice space. Our intention is to dissolve and expand the heavily policed boundaries about what constitutes ‘masculinity.’ This space is open to anyone self-identified as masculine, at least in part, at least some of the time. The last sessions evolved around themes like ‘friendship’, ‘competition’, ‘attraction’ with a group made up of non-binary, trans and cis masculine participants, exchanging about social norms, projections and learned behaviours, listening to each other and eventually even connecting outside of the digital space. That’s why such projects are part of the broader question Cassie mentioned: how do we get more people to care?

Cassie: The climate crisis and colonial legacies are producing massive upheaval. Lives are being disrupted at every level, and yet we have so few systems that actually reproduce care.

So I keep coming back to care as the thread that connects all the crises—and the Hologram as one response. We need more people who feel capable and worthy of offering care. That needs to become normalized and supported, so care is no longer undervalued or sidelined. 

One way is by starting to use the Hologram model in more institutional care spaces. It could help redefine what care looks like and make it more accessible and sustainable, both for people giving and receiving it.

All caregivers—whether they’re brain surgeons, nurses, janitors, carrot harvesters, babysitters, hunger strikers, or anything else—need better support. They need to understand that to keep showing up and doing the work, they themselves need sustained care. That’s my focus now: how do we generate long-term care to meet long-term crises? Even within institutions we think will always be there, we can’t take anything for granted anymore.

I want to intervene and support the development of more and better caregivers—people who can and want to keep doing this work over time.