MYTHICAL CELESTIAL BODIES: WHITE HOLE

Exhibition audio tour and text

This is for an exhibition at Mehringplatz 20 in Berlin, in the apartment building that creates a hole in the center of the image above. The audio tour is available here: https://www.mjhartelova.com/cassie-thornton-audioguide
The audio is designed and recorded by John Broback, with the text written and read by me. The exhibition is open until July 18, 2023 and if you have any questions or would like to visit the exhibit you can email MJHartelova@gmail.com.

Each of these numbers on the map have an audio piece that goes with them.
Here is the audio guide: https://www.mjhartelova.com/cassie-thornton-audioguide

STATION 1: BATHROOM

Hey, thanks for coming to my show inside a white hole. I'm Cassie. You can call me an artist because, what else could we possibly call a professionally developed and very weird person like me? I'm an expert in mythical celestial bodies: things that are made more real because we believe in them, like capitalism, black holes, linear time. For the next 5 minutes I am going to talk with you in the bathroom. Feel free to do your thing

I know you are wondering, What is a white hole? A white hole is a perfectly made up idea by a bunch of dudes who want us to imagine that we understand how everything in the universe works. They've been trying to understand black holes for so long, and for some theoretical physicists, describing the white hole helped them to feel at peace with the black hole.

A black hole sucks everything around it inside of it, and turns it into a shimmering non hierarchy of dancing everythingness. A white hole is like a brightly lit exit– a very small door in a black hole where all that everythingness eventually leaks out, flattened into a very very long thin stream, in a single file line. To me a black hole is like a dance club near the center of the earth called The Undercommons and the White Hole is closer to something like a line at the Landesamt. It is where the magic of a black hole comes to trickle out and die. Is it easier to imagine the end of capitalism then it is to imagine a blackhole without a white hole?

In review, we are in an exhibition about mythical celestial bodies. The first mythical celestial body we have met is the white hole, which is the theoretical anus of a black hole. Have a seat on the throne. 

Now I'm going to talk about where I came from. 

My name is Cassie, but when I was born, I was called Cassandra. Do you know about Cassandra? She was immortal, but alive in ancient Greece. She was the princess of Troy. Apollo, the sun god of fine arts who you probably know about from lots of statues and coffee mugs and also the name of the optical brand here in Germany. He saw Cassandra and fell in love. So he gave her the Power of Prophecy. But she wasn't so into him. When she said no to him, he cursed her and he made her a prophet who no one believed. So Cassandra went on to predict the Trojan War, and her own death, but nobody believed her. 

I wonder if this is how it really went down between Apollo and Cassandra, or if Cassandra was always a prophet. Apollo, as a male and as a god, had many times greater power than Cassandra. He could and did dominate her. Without giving him a magical power, I feel that we could surmise that he used the power of suggestion, amplified by the power of patriarchy to debilitate Cassandra's ability to properly share her prophecies. Do all of our myths need a white asshole? 

Speaking of monsters, one of my main jobs in this life is to misuse and transform our imaginal relationship to money and debt. Like Apollo and white holes, these celestial bodies have such an absurd amount of power over us. When I was in graduate school, just before Occupy Wall Street, nobody around me understood debt.  I came to grad school because it was potentially politically radical and a great place to plan the revolution, but instead, because everyone was going into so much debt in their education, this radical place was much more focused on developing skills for surviving an art market, which I found incredibly boring.I started hypnotizing art students at my school, asking them to visualize debt as an architecture that they lived in. I thought that if I could understand the shape of the prison people were in, we might be able to build it together as a real physical thing, and then break out of it. 

Do you want to see what some others saw? Close your eyes. Imagine you are walking through a big green open field, something that looks like a screensaver with a blue sky and rolling hills. You walk up to look at some big metal slabs coming out of grass. Who put these here? They are so heavy and metallic. They seem familiar but are not coming from a good place. The closer you get, you realize that they are always leaning in a way that feels like they are going to fall on you. They are heavy, rusty, but not that old. 

Many people imagined debt to be like this. And this description sounded so much like the sculptures that I saw in corporate courtyards all over San Francisco and New York City by Richard Serra, one of the most financially successful artists in America. He went to school at my grad school! So I was sure that there was some important connection to be made between what he was making, and the debt that we were making, since they looked the same. In my creative writing class called Monsters, I began to write letters to Richard Serra, financial shaman, to ask him if he could help me get my fellow art students out of debt. Richard Serra never got back to me, but I did follow him and send people to drop off my letter in his kitchen, his gallery and his studio. If you lift the toilet seat, you will find a copy of my letter to Dick. If you want to sit on the toilet for a bit longer, you could also have a look at the book called Wages for Artwork, where there is a profile written about my years long collaboration with Dick, described by Leigh Clare La Berge.

Stand up. Let's have a look at the toilet bowl. open it up. Stare into the hole. While looking at the water, flush the toilet. The spinning of the water is something like a white hole. A white hole is a mythical celestial body, just like black holes, galaxies, capitalism and patriarchy and we aren't sure it is real. Physicists use water to model how white holes might work in space. BUT sometimes they naturally occur in water and the strange spinning sometimes means that the water gets the power to do nearly impossible things, like make a river climb a hill. Strange power can be scary or amazing, or both

.

While you are standing here I want to show you one more thing. Above the toilet is a plaque. It is an engraving of an email I got from the creative writing teacher who taught the class about monsters, when I wrote letters to Dick. My teacher is named Miranda. This is probably my favorite email I've ever received. I love how it makes me a kind of weak prophet, written by a true one. Miranda basically says that maybe it's possible that the letters I wrote and delivered to Richard Serra in her class, that didn't make any sense in the year 2011, contributed to the moment we are in now when the US Education Department is discussing debt cancellation. She says that maybe that strange letter actually set something into motion that led to a weak cosmic shift wherein the US government is forced by activists like the Debt Collective to re-evaluate the way it profits off of education. However, it is important to say that whatever I did or did not set into motion is a weak version of the cosmic overhaul that would ever be visible from space, or truly meaningful to humans. Canceling $10,000 off of a $200,000 student debt bill like mine, on a planet where most people don't have sufficient food or housing, is the perfect definition of a pyrrhic victory. 

STATION 2: RIBS PAINTING

Next, I wanted to show you some paintings. Yes, do you see the one with the ribs? Do you have ribs?

I bet you didn't think that I was a painter. And I'm not. I just do it at night. I made a couple of paintings recently. And I really wanted to show them and I didn't know why. These paintings are actually the whole reason for this show in a way. I made this painting in a trance. This is a painting of a crisis that I was having, which was keeping me in bed and making me feel really sick. I was feeling that I have been given too many gifts. And it was feeling like those gifts were rotting inside of me, and had all gathered in my diagram like black metal tar. And you know, they were the kind of gifts I never wanted but that I never said no to. It's kind of like, one time Magda gave me these socks that her mom gave her, that were like, black kitty cat socks that went up to her knees. and then she gave them to me because she just didn't want that gift or what they represented to her. 

Do you have to be grateful for everything you are given, even if you never wanted it? Well, the gifts that I am talking about are not from my mom, not exactly. They come from colonialism and capitalism and Empire– I'm talking about the so called gift of privilege, of being white, of my US passport, of having enough money to go out to eat while the world is burning, when there's people all around me that don't have any of those things. There's even gifts of being given a natural sense of authority or charisma that makes me somehow have power that I also never really planned on or wanted. 

The damning part of being handed really intense gifts that are not equally distributed, is that there seems to be no way to use them correctly in an unjust world. And there is so much pressure to use them ethically. But I don't know if there is a way to do that. What would it mean to use toxic gifts well? Is that what it means to be anti-capitalist? I wish I knew how to be an anti-capitalist gift giver. I wish I could give these gifts away. At the same time, I am scared of losing what I know. I'm just a small animal. Have a seat on the bed, under the chandelier.

STATION 3: THE BED

Come sit on the bed underneath the beautiful chandelier. You can lay down or sit down. Just relax. This bed belongs to Magda, who is also the curator of this show. Like, she sleeps here inside the white hole for the duration of this exhibition.

 

The result of most art exhibitions is …that everyone gets sick! Especially me and the curator. In this way, I feel like most art exhibitions take away more than they give to everyone who works on them. It's such a big build up, with hours and hours of preparation, tons of money and focus. Only a few people will see most exhibitions, and even fewer will feel anything. And all this is still happening, at a huge scale, while the world is burning.

I find it incredibly cute to watch how humans cannot remain healthy living inside contradictions. Not that health is really something we can access in our world today. Is it possible to make an exhibition that isn't a contradiction? Is it possible to make an exhibition that produces more health than it destroys? 

I made a set of exercises for me and Magda to do everyday of this exhibition in the white hole. You can do it too. I wonder if we could reverse the pattern of the white hole, and have more energy from making this exhibition. And to say no to the things that come in the future that want to turn our energy into some jerk's profit. This set of exercises is about becoming harder to fuck with.

Once you are seated, I want us to make the sound of a waterfall. Waterfalls are something we only have on earth. They seem decorative but they are some of the strongest forces on the planet. They are the most valuable white noise machines on earth.

There's a few ways you can become a waterfall. First, I want you to take a big deep inhale and then when you exhale, exhale with the sound of Shhhhhhhh. Every time you run out of air, inhale again and as you exhale a big, long shhhhhhh. Shhh yourself like a baby. A baby in a beautiful waterfall.

Are you still breathing in and exhaling Shhhh?

When you finish your next exhale, you can pause and come back to a normal breath. If you are a little dizzy or if your limbs tingle, that's ok. Just see how calm you can get.

For the past year and a half I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between care and water. How they are both natural resources that we turn into money. Care and water are, for a lack of a better term, nature. Money is not nature. 

In the white hole, I fear that money feels as if it is inevitable, something planetary, something we could not exist without. And maybe some of those statements are true right now. But meanwhile, water and care multiply like magic, in the right conditions. What would it mean to focus on multiplying what we already have so there is enough care and water for everyone? What if we protected and loved these things more than we cared about anything else?

Now let's begin the second breath. This one will focus on the inhale, through pursed lips. Suck in air through your lips and feel the cool air in your mouth, and listen to the sound. You can exhale through your nose, or exhale with the shhhh sound. Breathe in and out as deeply and completely as you can, as long and slow as possible.

At the end of your next breath, let all the air out. You can sit like this, empty of air, as long as that is comfortable. When you are ready, you can let some air back in and breathe normally. 

I noticed something about me and Magda, maybe you can relate. That it is very hard to accept payment for what we do. It's as if money has been cursed, and maybe we don't want our work to be cursed. Something in both of us, separately and together, turns away from it, fears it. We work together for our jobs, and we both have trouble sending the invoice, but in different ways. This next set of breaths is going to remove our fear and respect for money and increase an awareness that we will not become contaminated by it, nor by an artificial sense of luxury or comfort while the world is burning. We will accept money as a form of survival and economic self defense, and we will use it as a gift when we can. We will use the money to take care of ourselves and anyone else we can help. It is ok to allow money to come towards us, because it will not control us. We trust ourselves to use it to support people who need it so we can plan the revolution with them.

Take your next inhale through your nose until your belly and chest are completely full. Now exhale while making an audible "he" sound. You may need to smile to make this sound. See how slow and long your exhale can go and if you can slowly extend it, while continuing to make the white noise.

Now, let's finish that breath. You can stop smiling now but you don't have to. We'll begin our last breath in just a minute. For now, sit quietly, and let the feeling of a sparkling waterfall cover you as your nervous system resets. Let all the tingles and twitches run over your skin like cold water. You are, afterall, mostly made of water. But you are also mostly made of care. Humans do not survive without care. Care can be a type of work. But what would it take for care work to produce energy? What kind of conditions would be necessary for care not to feel like something that is extractive, or expensive, but something that feels more like a waterfall? A waterfall that has not been contaminated or privatized or that is running out of water.. What kinds of conditions would it take for you to live in a world where the people who give the most care, are so cared for, that the care they give comes out of a surplus. It would mean that every person would have to do care work. It would mean that the people who do the most carework in the world, which is always predominantly done by feminized racialized people, would now be done by the others too. And the careworkers of today get to do the care they want to do, but not with coercive financial pressure, or with a question of survival. Imagine living in a world where all caregivers were truly cared for. Would there be rich people? What if care was the currency, and life was the goal of our economy? Make it rain, baby!

For this last breath, let's inhale through our nose and exhale through our wide open mouth, making an 'ahhhhhhhh' sound. See how big you can make your mouth while keeping your body relaxed. See if you can exhale until you are completely empty. At the bottom of each breath, you can wait until you are ready to inhale. When you inhale, take in as much air as you can, all the way to the bottom of your belly, and fill up your whole chest, without becoming tense. And then when you let the air out make as much sound as you can, the biggest white noise.

When you finish this next breath, you may feel very dizzy or you may have a lot of energy. Please find a place to sit where you can look out the window.

STATION 4: THE WINDOW

Let's look out of the window. Maybe you can see that it's a line graph. Going left to right, we are moving forward in linear time. We are somewhere far on the left of the timeline. This is a diagram of a feeling that I have, that you might share. I feel like I am living a double life.

Let's start by looking at the top line, which decreases in intensity as we move forward. That's the dimension that I believe that we are in right now. It's the dimension where we live in Berlin and everything's kind of okay. Things are a little bit weird. The spring is a little bit strange this year. We have allergies. We go shopping, go dancing. Have friends. Things are relatively normal. We do a lot of exercise to stay calm, and we drink flat weights to get more energy to kind of break through the sort of white noise that feels like it's always there. Kind of a numbing sound. We call this the flat white dimension.

Now let's look at the red line below that. If we move through linear time from left to right, you'll notice that it starts low and then as we move into the future it grows and grows. Not particularly gradually. This is the dimension that I only can sense when I first wake up or before I go to bed or when I'm really really sick, which is when I think of this dimension. It's the dimension where you know that things are incredibly bad for a lot of people and for a lot of life all over the planet. It's the dimension where you know that people you know have families who are living in war, where the Mediterranean is filled with people who are trying to escape war but have nowhere to go, where the economy doesn't let most people in the world live, much less live well. Where entire places are flooding and disappearing or places that we love are burning. My sense is that as we move forward in time, this dimension, which I call the demons coming out of the sidewalk dimension, will be growing. And eventually the demons coming out of the sidewalk will cross the flat white dimension. And at that point, I'm not sure what is going to happen.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this and thinking about how useless I might be when the demons come out of the sidewalk because everything I've been trained to do has to do with the economy. How to survive financially, how to trick the financial system, how to get groceries, how to feel like my life is worth continuing. But all of that feels really, really not useful in an emergency. I've been asking a lot of people around me if they would tell me about what they think about the moment when the lines cross, about where they are at on the lines and how they're dealing with the time until the lines cross. Sometimes when you start to think specifically about the material things that you know are likely to happen it makes your fear less abstract, and then you can begin to build some sort of scaffolding around what you need to do. to be there. And so I've been asking lots of people I know to fill out surveys about this. And then, I'm getting a little bit less afraid of this diagram, even though I know that it's there. You can hold onto the surveys I have collected by 30 friends from around the world. You can feel the weight, and also the awkward lightness of this interdimensional life we are in. This information is so serious that I had to make a cat toy out of it.

STATION 5: THE BALCONY

Welcome to the balcony. If you smoke, feel free to have a cigarette and please drink as much water as you can. We're right on the edge of the white hole here, right on the edge of the Ring. If you were standing outside the White Hole, you would be able to see that there's a flag on the side of the white hole for a political party that I want to start. It says All Caregivers Will Be Cared For.

For a lot of years now I've been working on a project called The Hologram which is a project where we do a protocol for mutual aid. We've done this protocol with 1000s of people. And that means that I've heard a lot of people talk about why it's so hard to ask for help. What I learned, or had confirmed, over the past three years is that the people that do the most care work in the world have the hardest time asking for help. NHS emergency room nurses have a hard time asking for help. So do parents, health aids, janitors, and cooks. So something that has become my dream has been to imagine that in the reconstitution of the world, after the two lines cross, there might be a global non electoral political party. It will be run by people who do care work. And the demand would be that all caregivers are cared for.

So what would that look like? What would it take to create an internationalist party for caretakers and caregivers? What would change if all caregivers were cared for? To me, it would be like the Big Bang except real. It would change everything. If you imagine that everybody, everybody gives care in some way. And we would have to care for all of them. So the person who cleans the hallways in your apartment, you and your neighbours would need to make sure that they have stable housing, a visa, good food, a network of friends.... maybe in order for them to have a good life they would like to have a tiny piece of land to garden on, or a place to make music. We would all have to take time out every day to do care work to make that happen. It would change all of our lives. I think it might mean there wouldn't be rich people. I think it would mean we would have to find completely different ways of using our resources. It might be the end of the economy, and of the nation state. I think it would be the end of the world as we know it except in a really good way. So I welcome you to hang out here and think about what it might mean to become a part of an international political party. With the demand all caretakers be taken care of. 

STATION 5: SURVEY

So welcome to the last part of the exhibition. I would love to hear from you. Please sit down at the desk and fill out my survey. I originally originally gave a version of this survey to just 30 of my friends. I want to know what you're afraid of, but also what you're looking forward to and the worldwide transformation that we will inevitably go through next. Don't be afraid because we're all in it together. I think the damning part of capitalism is that it tells you that you're alone and that it's your fault. But I want you to know that it's also my fault and I'm here with you. And I kind of think that there's something really amazing about acknowledging the dimensions that we don't want to see. Because when we don't ignore them, it means we have to change. And that's all we really have anyway.