The NewBridge Project Gallery is currently closed.
As part of Blazing New Worlds we invite you to be part of the very first in-person Hologram course, delivered over 3 weeks here at The NewBridge Project throughout November. If you are interested in practical approaches to feminist, peer-to-peer, and post capitalist support networks then you should consider applying.
What is it to feel AT HOME now, 18 months into a global pandemic? The conditions of our bodies, work, homes, communities, and of the planet have changed because of massive environmental, social and economic crises. While everything in the world is still shaking, we want to invite you TO BUILD A HOUSE OUT OF PEOPLE.
We know from local and global histories of public marches, collective actions, labour organizing and strikes, that we are the most powerful when we use moments of insecurity to connect to each other. Coming together to create change begins by witnessing the vulnerabilities of others and seeing how they overlap with our own to tell a story of our shared social conditions. By practicing new forms of distributed trust, support and solidarity, we believe that we can build a stable social network in Shieldfield that will outlast our individual and collective crises. Our relationships can create a sense of belonging and of home that will shelter and energize us.
The Hologram is a viral peer-to-peer health project that flips around our individual insecurity to make it into our greatest strength. No one is truly at home until everyone is. This practice reveals a simple way to give and receive care and attention that anyone can do without exhaustion or expertise.
In our first in-person course, we will offer the Hologram practice as a way to strengthen the community of Shieldfield, and to set the social conditions for thriving no matter the personal or public crisis. Whether you are shaken by social isolation, mental and physical challenges, lack of housing, environmental devastation, or borders, we welcome you to join us, TO BUILD A HOUSE OUT OF PEOPLE.
One part social practice, one part technology of revolution, and one part feminist science fiction come to life, The Hologram is a lightweight, replicable, autonomous protocol for human cooperation.
The Hologram is an experiment in person-to-person care and cooperation in which three people (a triangle) offer to listen and ask questions to a fourth (the hologram). Soon members of the triangle themselves become holograms with new triangles and the collective support spreads. In time, the triangle becomes a living medical record for the hologram. The Hologram model includes a structured protocol for distributing care virally, to ensure that everyone who gives care is cared for.
The Hologram is also a fast-growing, international network of people practising this precise form of distributed non-expert healthcare. From beds and sofas in USA, Canada, Mexico, Palestine, Singapore, India and across Europe, we’ve been meeting online since April 2020 to create a strong, self-sustaining network of listening and trust that we all need in order to outlive the broken society in which we live. The project and the community that surrounds it understands that properly supporting someone else’s wellbeing can be therapeutic in itself, especially when we can do it without always leaning into expert authority, individual heroism, or a heavy sense of personal responsibility.
The birth of the Hologram coincided with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, forcing our social work to be online until now! We have offered 4 courses online. This course will be the first to take place in person, structured to set up a small group of people to create a network of support that can last well into and beyond future emergencies and crises on our collective horizons. This will be an experimental process with the hope to create the first Hologram community that is rooted in a geographic location. It is our hope that the course is the beginning of a new form of long term care distribution network that can develop into a platform for anti-racist housing justice, both based in a practice of care and interdependence.
This is the fifth course for people interested in practicing The Hologram. The Hologram is an idea, a practice, an experiment and a growing community. “We” are Cassie Thornton and Lita Wallis, your course facilitators. We are also a larger group of people helping each other. You can find more out about us at https://thehologram.xyz/.
This course, TO BUILD A HOUSE OUT OF PEOPLE, will take place for three consecutive weeks, on Saturdays and Wednesdays, starting 6th November and finishing on 20th November. Each session will run from 5-8pm on Wednesdays and 12-4pm on Saturdays, at The NewBridge Project : Shieldfield Centre. Please only apply if you can commit to attending 4 of the 5 workshops. This course will focus on the question how to build a long term network of support, solidarity and collective belonging in a moment of great instability, and will be aimed at people who live in or are connected to Shieldfield.
This course will be offered for 16 “incomers” (people who are new to The Hologram) to learn about the history and reasoning behind The Hologram practice, as well as an opportunity to experiment with it together, in person. The practice itself values and puts together the processes of personal introspection, social cooperation, and strategic anti-capitalist organization. Each workshop takes 3 hours and is composed of presentations, and it also includes personal introspective work, large group discussion and small group work. Everyone who joins us will be well supported, challenged, and invited to join the larger global Hologram community of practitioners.
Thursday 14 October: Taster Workshop (5:30 – 7:00pm)
Saturday 6th November: Hologram Course 01 (12:00 – 4:00pm)
Wednesday 10th November: Hologram Course 02 (5:00 – 8:00pm)
Saturday 13th November: Hologram Course 03 (12:00 – 4:00pm)
Wednesday 17th November: Hologram Course 04 (5:00 – 8:00pm)
Saturday 20th November: Hologram Course 05 (12:00 – 4:00pm)
The Hologram Course’s will be held at The NewBridge Project and will be closed off to the public.
On Wednesday sessions, participants will be welcome to the space from 5pm with refreshments allowing time to settle in. The sessions officially start at 6pm.
Reading Circle
Thursday 4th November, 5.30-7.30
Come read some sections of The Hologram together.
Please email cooperativespecies@gmail.com for slots, if you have any questions or accessibility requirements.
Please note that there are a limited number of spaces available. Please only apply if you can commit to attending 4 of the 5 workshops.
To apply for a place in the course, please click on the button below and fill out an application form. If you have any question, please email cooperativespecies@gmail.com
*Caregiving is often the labour of women and femmes. We want to challenge this power dynamic, and so we want to encourage participation by people who identify as men. Everyone is welcome!
**We have a small budget reserved for making sure the course can be as accessible as possible. If you would require additional support in order to be able to attend, please mention this in the section provided in the application form, and one of our team will be in touch to see what we can do.
As the racist, capitalist and patriarchal world crumbles around us, we invite people to design long-lasting systems for support and solidarity that can ensure that our species can outlast the coming social, economic and planetary emergencies. Participants in the courses experiment with how to organize and value the support they need to survive and thrive in the coming new world.
We offer several courses every year, each shaped to fit common collective needs. Sometimes we organize a course for a certain group of people. For example, in 2021 so far we hosted courses especially for healthcare workers or people who identify as men. In each course people from around the world meet for six sessions (until now, they were online) where we practice and discuss the social skills, values, and priorities that are central to the Hologram model. Each person will leave the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram. At the conclusion of the course, all participants are invited to join the Community of Practice, an autonomous community of hologram practitioners. All of the courses have an application which you must fill to be considered. The Hologram courses are led by two people from our team of facilitators.
Lita Wallis is a youth worker, organiser, and informal educator based in Mid-Wales. Whether in work or her personal life, Lita has spent much of her time experimenting with different shapes of supportive relationships (eg., cooperatives, triangles, flows and webs.) She is still working on ways to build sustainable support networks that challenge isolating social norms, and then how to commit to them in a social context that is so hostile to putting down roots. Five years ago she and two friends made a lifelong commitment to The Tripod, a platonic support system, which aims to provide much of the financial, emotional and housing support that many people end up relying on couple relationships for. She hopes to bring some learning from this experience, plus some seeds of inspiration from her work with young people and her avid sci-fi habit, to support people to use The Hologram in a way that gives them power and energy.
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 is available from Pluto Press called The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post Pandemic Future. 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.
TO BUILD A HOUSE OUT OF PEOPLE with The Hologram is a BLAZING NEW WORLDS commission which developed out of conversations between Cassie Thornton, Lita Wallis, Niomi Fairweather (NBP Programme Director), Beatriz Lobo (NBP Programme Coordinator) and Andrew Wilson (Artist & NBP Programme Committee Member).
Blazing New Worlds is a programme of commissions, events and workshops in celebration of The NewBridge Project’s 11th Birthday. Throughout the programme a series of open calls and funding opportunities were released and supported projects were hosted in the gallery and online. Commissions by the artists Graeme Hopper (Grassi Art) and Cassie Thornton have been publicly displayed in the gallery throughout the programme, since October.
We commissioned Slack’s founder Jon Cornbill, to construct a radio booth that has been on display in the NewBridge gallery throughout the Slack’s Radio residency. The first round of the residency saw Slack’s Radio take over the gallery with a programme of music, performance, spoken word and conversation.
The NewBridge Project is supported by Arts Council England, Newcastle Culture Investment Fund, Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice and the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
