Hey culture worker! Are you feeling alone and afraid while the world burns? It's Too Late. Do It Anyway! is two books in one, created for cultural workers who want to get off the racial capitalist high-speed-train-to-nowhere and start structuring revolution through collective care.
It's Too Late. Do It Anyway! offers two routes into a fractal support network designed to shed absurd, useless forms of artworld prestige in favor of collectively producing a world organized to support caregivers. It's Too Late tells the true story of an exhibition about care that exposed the difference between making symbolic gestures and actually doing something. Do It Anyway! serves as a manual for The Hologram, a prism-shaped collective care protocol conceptualized by artist Cassie Thornton, inspired by the Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki in Greece, and now practiced by people all over the world.
In It's Too Late. Do It Anyway! multiple voices weave The Hologram into the present, the past, and the future all at once, ultimately putting the story and the tools it describes into each reader's life-wizened hands. This is not really a book; it's a pathway out of the tough spot we are all in right now. Anyone can make use of it, even you.
Cassie Thornton is changing. In the apocalypse, everything must change, including us and the work we value and how we value things. We call Cassie an artist because we don't have a better title for someone working this hard on invisible stuff, like changing. But in another time, she might have been called a janitor, one in a long line of descendents of Janus-the two-faced god of transitions, time, and passages-in Ancient Roman myth. Cassie has come to clean up the messes of her confused, lonely, and dysfunctional family, the beneficiaries of the western empires.
A two-faced catalyst, Cassie works in at least two ways to clean up some of the old colonial and capitalist garbage lying around our collective psychic architecture. First, using good-natured practices she has developed including The Hologram, she helps groups and individuals build social infrastructure with trust, integrity and communication that will naturally evict hierarchies and toxic uses of power. This work includes workshops, consulting, and lectures about care, debt, and crisis. This work can live independently or can be the groundwork for the second type of work, which includes sharp and incisive political art about the absurdity of our most sacred social structures (power, privilege, financialization, and security) on a burning planet. This work has recently included writing extensively about The Flat White Dimension where we drink coffee and talk about the world burning, attending a tech conference as a working class elder from the future, or turning a Swiss spa into a place that transforms privilege into something useful. Cassie wrote a popular book called The Hologram published by Pluto Press, and helped launch an international social movement where all caregivers are cared for. She is also a steward for a bar that is secretly a social clinic in Berlin called The Casino for Social Medicine.
Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova is a Czech-Sorbian curator and conflict facilitator and art producer living in Berlin. They are the co-founder of Casino for Social Medicine, a third space in Berlin's Neukölln that is part simple coffee house, part clinic for collectivist experiences, and part mutual aid gamble. They run the Mehringplatz 20 bedroom gallery and-together with Cassie Thornton and many others-are the co-conspirator of The Hologram project, a peer-to-peer care protocol practiced from couches all over the world. Their ongoing projects involve the temporary "free university of unlearning," strategizing for curating towards the end of Art-as-we-know-it, and connecting with initiatives that organize for health autonomy and liberation
