Cassie Thornton^US/DE

Cassie Thornton is an American artist living in Berlin who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. Her long-term project, The Hologram (2016-), is a collective peer-to-peer mutual aid practice for distributing care virally, to ensure that everyone who gives care is cared for. This widely used practice, community, and book are an antidote to years of living, studying, and organizing people who suffer from the alienating effects of debt. Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, describes this practical feminist economics experiment.
Thornton also produces social processes, exhibitions, pranks, zines, videos, events, public rituals, workshops, and experimental lectures that undermine the illusion of individual power on a burning planet. For example, she 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). She is smart but not an academic, and she does not work for an institution.