Cassie Thornton

Bio

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 new book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Rapid Response Project 

For Phase 1 of Rapid Repsonse, Thornton is creating a new online course to supplement her book project The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. The course, titled ‘We must begin again: Asking for help as a new world”, will be 6 weeks, and include 28 participants. The course will build off of key concepts introduced in her publication, which asks how we can take health care back into our hands in an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and die. In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network.