An insurgency of sick artists is organising to resist the global crisis of care, from bed and over the phone.
In these days of compulsive overwork in the so-called creative economy, we’re all sick artists.
Using ancient technologies of peer-to-peer care, a grassroots health monitoring and diagnostic system is emerging, practiced from beds and couches all over the world.
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). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.