It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! A Book about Being a Cultural Worker in the Apocalypse + a Hologram Starter Kit

New book from Thick Press!

It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! A Book about Being a Cultural Worker in the Apocalypse + a Hologram Starter Kit

Cassie Thornton & Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova (curators)
4.3 x 8.4 in; 212 pages
Ills. color, paperback
Design by Eleonora Toniolo
ISBN: 978-1-7320666-6-3
$24
SHIPPING IN JUNE!

Online Book Launch on June 8, 6-9pm CET

*new zoom registration in case the last one was confusing!!!

In person book launch at Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin on June 6, 6-9pm CET

Please write to cassie.thornton@gmail.com if you have questions, would like to suggest an event, or if you would like a pdf so you can review it!

---

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.

This little time jumper is a slow emergence in an emergency, not a rocket or an ambulance. It is low to the ground, but in the future, which might be right now. It is a form of traction in a slippery time that calls itself frictionless. It is a thank you note to the art world that also asks for a bit more integrity and continuity between what we do and what we say. It is TOO LATE! DO IT ANYWAY!

In 2022 I may have done something which could be considered a mistake. Let's call it a learning moment and a beautiful exhibition. Is it okay to make exhibitions in the apocalypse? Thanks to the curation of Prem Krishnamurti, I had a pretty big solo exhibition as a part of the Cleveland Front Triennial. I made a huge installation at the National Museum of Psychology in Akron, Ohio. It was very meaningful for me, because The Hologram was placed in a chronological survey of the field of psychology in a historical museum that goes in a circle. And so, The Hologram was placed at the end of the circle and the beginning of the circle, in and out of time.

Our exhibition was located in the year 2038, so to view it was to look at some aspect of the future of psychology; The Hologram represented an end or a transformation to the field. This aspect of the project felt like participating in a beautiful parafiction, a little lie that if told well, could make its way into reality. So I don't regret the exhibition, though I still am not sure if exhibitions are okay in the apocalypse.

What is okay in the apocalypse? What is okay for a cultural worker like me and maybe like you to do in the apocalypse? I'm not sure, but I do know that there's a big gap between what we're doing and what we're talking about.

I wanted to make an exhibition guide for an exhibition that happened in 2022 and starting in 2023 I began to work on it with a designer named Ele Toniolo. As we began to construct an exhibition guide for a show that happened far away and a longer time ago in the past, I realized that the exhibition guide was just an excuse to make something else. The deeper I thought into the process of trying to make an exhibition guide, the more help I needed, because I got stuck in the year 2038 (the year of the 2038 problem, a Y2k-ish moment when the internet was supposed to end when every device that was made smart would become vulnerable) which was the year when the exhibition took place.

I invited Magdalena Jadwiga Hartelova to help me make sense of what we were doing and to contribute some writing. I invited Hey There Kapplow and their entire science fiction way of being (and editing) to help me weave a narrative that jumps through time and space. Magda and I invited collaborators from The Hologram who are also curators (Ruth Catlow, Amanda Nudelman and Shawn Chua) to help us think about curating in the future and in the past and to locate our shame and liberation in all of it. I contacted Thick Press who agreed to publish us with so much care, experimentation, attention, thoroughness and support. We included people that we usually organize Casino for Social Medicine with, like Demi Lee, as our proofreader. And of course, we had contributions from all the curators who had their hands on the exhibition project all the way through. Some of my favorite Pirate Librarians showed up from the Memory of the World Library. And through it all, we didn't really steal or break too much.

The first half of the book is a little bit of an exhibition guide that also turns into a sci-fi thriller and a manifesto. The second half of the book is a very useful manual for how to use The Hologram. This doesn't feel like it is THE “new” Hologram book, but it does feel like a project that came out of a process, and a lot of the process includes learning why the gap must be narrowed between what we think and say and what we do, which many Hologram organizers have been feeling a lot of.

Another worldly form of integrity is needed in our personal relationships and on the world stage. The Hologram is a way of practicing an intentionality, communication, vulnerability and trust that is needed to survive the apocalypse that we are in and the ones that are to come, because another end of the world is possible. Who do you trust? Who can you speak with about the unknown? Are your friends all right? What if things get better and worse at the same time? How do we make sure that the people who are responsible for the betterness are also supported? AKA, let's make sure all caregivers are cared for. How would this change the apocalypse?

As much as I would like to say that you should pre-order this book from thick press, if you have the money to order this book, would you please support a campaign to support a friend and their family in Palestine first? I'm currently involved with three families in Palestine, sometimes more. The Hologram taught me not only how to organize emotional, mental and physical support, but how to take risks, ask for and give help when it's needed.

In Our Lifetime by Rommy Torrico https://justseeds.org/graphic/in-our-lifetime/

Please donate to Mahmoud and his family in Gaza: https://ko-fi.com/gazafundraiser

Before you buy a book that will help you feel better, make you laugh and help you plan, I strongly ask you to support a family that is surviving the apocalypse directly on their skin and in their bones. I've been organizing groups of people to support other groups of people. We use the excuse of fundraising for people living in Gaza to organize small groups of people around families who are asking for help as their world ends many times over. What we are building is an international Hologram that not only redirects funding from the Empire to the parts of the world that have been sacrificed for the Empire, but it also builds a network of support that flows the same direction. I'm going to be writing more about this in the future, about the ways we can use fundraising for people who are suffering from the abuses of OUR empire to produce networks of revolutionary support that are emotional, physical, mental and much more.

But for now, I would say that if you want to practice The Hologram, start by giving away more than you think you can, tell a friend about it including all the feelings, and as a reward for taking that risk get yourself a pizza. And if there's any change left you can pre-order our new book.