Social Spa for Collective Mutation
a spa you can come to when you know you need to change but you're not sure how
I am willing to lose/destroy my____________________
if it helps us get closer to____________________.
Example: I am willing to lose my individual career dreams in order for us to get closer to living in a just economy that centers the production and care of all people, plants, land and animals.
Below is the accompanying text written for each room of the spa/exhibition,
by Cassie Thornton for an immersive exhibition at Bagno Popolare: https://bagnopopolare.ch/
in Baden, Switzerland; January 2024
by The Feminist Economics Department (the FED) featuring:
Cassie Thornton
Curated by Anna Lehr and Kathrin Doppler
With interventions and support from Antonia Hernandez and Jamie Allen
With opening performances by Julian Prugger, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova
Global Stress Smash Therapy Room:
If there's one thing that we can say about most visitors to this bath, it's that we have access to really nice stuff. Our quality of life is very high, and we could say that the standards we are accustomed to qualify us as members of the privileged elite of the world. We didn't even have to ask for it– what a gift! What a curse! Actually, what a difficult situation to be in.
This room is dedicated to breaking stuff. In this room you're invited to think and feel what it is like to live relatively comfortably in the deep belly of fortress Europe among mountains, fresh air, clean water, gold and many banks during what is an apocalypse for many many of the living. This room is dedicated to working with the confusion and discomfort that may have built inside of you when you have felt the unfairness of the world from a protected and comfortable seat.
This room is also dedicated to seeing the energy that comes from sadness and rage, from watching genocide and climate disaster and large-scale suffering that ultimately comes from systems that you and I benefit from. This room is a place to throw plates, plates made of materials, ways of being and forms of power we never asked for but that we have to live with.
It is incredibly difficult to break our nice stuff, even if having that stuff is contingent on ruining the earth and making life sad. But what if we have to break some of the things that we're used to in order to deal with what's happening in the world?
This room is dedicated to these things:
-we all feel at least a little like breaking [out of] something
-privilege does not equal power
-big changes will and do happen collectively
In this room you can decide what it is you need to break, and then you will break a plate while focusing on that intention. Watch what happens, listen to the sounds, feel the anxiety that comes from breaking something in front of other people, for other people, and for yourself.
Steps
Select a plate. You may want to take it to the table as you think about this.
What do you want most for the world, for us all, that feels most impossible?
What are you willing to lose or destroy in order to get it for us?
Write your answer on a plate.
Clear the space around the bath. Tell anyone nearby you are going to break something so they don't interrupt you.
Light a candle.
Put on the safety goggles.
Stand on the "x" and inhale.
Throw your plate into the bath while screaming (though screaming is optional).
Sit back down at the table and write a contract: I am willing to lose/destroy my________ if it helps us get closer to __________. Example: I am willing to lose my individual career dreams in order for us to get closer to living in a just economy that centers the production and care of all people, plants, land and animals.
Place this contract in the waterproof envelope provided.
Please take your contract with you on your visit around the collective mutation spa until you reach the meditation room, where you can deposit it in the collective mutation wish database.
COLLECTIVE MUTATION AREA:
While you're in this room you are invited to ask questions. You don't need to have any answers because this is a room of curiosity. For example, I have a question. Are you sitting in the bath yet? Are your feet hot? Why is change so difficult and so scary?
If you are sitting in the bath, your feet may be close to a mosaic. This mosaic is made of broken stuff, including its creator’s broken sense that everything was going to be ok, or that she could ever feel safe, liberated or powerful on a planet that is so violent to so many. Do you feel like that too? The dishes were broken when some people threw plates and tiles while screaming. We were and are collectively enraged and exasperated about our historical, geographical, economic and cultural position as white people living in some of the most privileged and protected places on earth, enjoying the spoils of empire while many of the living lack access to basic necessities. We are primarily angry with ourselves because we don't know how to transform fast enough to respond meaningfully and collectively to such planetary scale violence, suffering and disaster. We are also sick of how self centered we can be. As we go to therapy to cry about our feelings of powerlessness, there are people who literally profit off of this mess (and they have addresses)! These tiles and plates were broken just like our sense of agency, belonging and connection to the world is also broken.
The mosaic is in the shape of a Hippocampus. The Hippocampus is a hybrid animal that was put in many Romanesque mosaics, including the mosaics at bathhouses in Baden in the late 19th century. The hippocampus is a mythical amphibious beast, either a cow or a horse in the front combined with a fish or a snake at the anterior. This being is said to represent mutation, change and adaptation. With legs and fins, this mutant is the true all terrain vehicle, right?
Authors note: Upon second and third thought, the Hippocampus might have mutated away from the possibility of survival. Instead of being capable of surviving both on land and in water, he actually needs both at the same time, rendering him in permanent search of the very peculiar places in the world that are both land and water. Swamps? Flooded car parks? I can imagine that he might be able to enjoy entering and leaving a bath, with his fin in the water, posterior legs on the tiles. This mutant might need something like a bath on wheels to keep the anterior moistened while the posterior pulls the load. I also wondered if he could survive on a planet with less gravity, so the tail could still maneuver and float while the legs can pull forward.
The name hippocampus is derived from the Greek hippokampus (hippos, meaning “horse,” and kampos, meaning “sea monster”). As you know, the hippocampus is also the word we use for a part of the brain. This tiny seahorse shaped part of us is very vulnerable to the types of stimuli we are most accustomed to receiving in this moment of late capitalism, and those very things that the healing industries (not including this bath house!) are built to profit off of. Stress, PTSD and depression are some common factors that lead to the atrophy of this sensitive little part of us, which can result in Alzheimers, Schizophrenia and Epilepsy. Are these ailments actually adaptations to a world whose harshness we cannot stand to remember?
Polar bears are mating with grizzly bears to make new types of bears. The loneliest whale on Earth makes a whale song that no other whales can hear because this whale is produced by two types of whale that had never mated before. Some animals are growing bigger beaks and longer legs. Many animals are adapting to food shortages. Humans are also mutating to deal with the changing conditions of the world. Microplastics are in our blood, chemicals are in our breastmilk, and air pollution particles are in our lungs. We are also silently shifting our daily lives around changing environmental, social and economic ecosystems due to climate change, reactionary hoarding, violent re-assertion of borders and national ideologies, and biodiversity depletion. How can we see that we are mutating, when no one is watching? And is it happening to some of us more than others?
This is a moment when much of the world has been hurt while some of us have remained materially comfortable, able to buy certain comforts to make the apocalypse softer. It is hard to imagine how the comfortable people of the world could collectively respond to the pain and loss happening to so many. This is a space for sitting in the heat of the unknown changes we will soon make, and letting the pressure of hot water work on us. Welcome to the spa of collective mutation!
Swamp Drainage Room:
This is a room that invites us to play with our hippocampus. The hippocampus is the mutant made of broken things sitting in the room. Or wait, is that you?
Here you'll see another mosaic. This mutant, (not you, but the hippocampus mosaic) was made when people threw plates because they did not and do not know what else to do about being stuck with too much privilege in the apocalypse. The hippocampus is a mythical creature and she is also a part of your brain shaped like a seahorse that maintains short and long term memory. In this room, you may regain access to your brain's buried memories and mutations. We will attempt to do this by using a dry toothbrush technique to drain some of the fluid out of that swamp surrounding our brains. You are invited to watch a video that shows you how to use internet folk medicine to drain the brain's dirty water from your brain. You may want to watch that video now, or after you finish reading.
Many people lose access to their long term and short term memory when they are in a state of stress or overwhelm. Has this happened to you lately? You are probably aware of at least one current genocide as well as many other catastrophes around the world. This goes on top of your awareness of many very old pre-existing unfair systems and different forms of violence, some that you may directly or indirectly benefit from. How does this affect you? Do you let it affect you?
The drainage of the swamp of lymphatic fluids surrounding your hippocampus is not a proven technique. However, participating in this collectively derived (harmless) fairy tale praxis may help you remove a layer of anxiety and stress, and that could allow you access to long and short term memory that you may have lost. You may discover that there is a way to care for each other so we don't lose our memory of where we are right now, or a time before now. When you drain the lymph from your brain, you may remember that we are living through a long story that is built on other stories that also include genocide, greed, land grabbing, and ultimately on the erasure of indigenous people from their land.
How can we survive the stress of being alive right now without forgetting, avoiding or going numb to how much pain and suffering is happening? What will we find if we can access our long term memories? Might we remember what it is like to build a world instead of just protecting it from destruction?
Money Laundry Room:
This cold bath is a place for you to experience your body's power to produce heat and transformation against something toxic and cold: money. As cold water lovers like Wim Hof say, going into cold water for extended amounts of time can lower your heart rate and raise your dopamine levels by up to 250%. It's funny, because talking about money can really do the opposite. Sharing resources, discussing it, or avoidance of the subject can raise the heart rate and create a cycle of anxiety and depression for those of us in capitalist societies. It seems like the more money we have, the harder it is to discuss, share or redistribute it. It is much easier to take risks when you don't have a lot to lose. This unfortunately means that the wealthiest people and societies in the world do not know how to redistribute their wealth.
This disaster we are collectively inside of may have started with the production of societies built on power imbalances, exchange, and money. These things are all protected and maintained using violence. Getting into cold water is difficult, but is it worth it to train ourselves to overcome difficult things? In this room you are invited to break some habits that we may have built to avoid discomfort. Instead, experiment with what it feels like to work with discomfort.
Please read the following while in the cold water:
Water is a gift. In the right conditions, we always have enough of it. If it wasn't turned into a commodity by corporations like the US Government and the Swiss corporation Nestle, it would be a gift for everyone. Even in its temporary state, frozen by monetization, it will still last far longer than our dirty money will. You are made of water. Something of you will also last much longer than any money or our evil financial system.
Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water
Nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered
Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong
Everybody knows it
Nobody uses that knowledge
From Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula K Le Guin
Thanks for cleaning the money with your presence. People are not toxic, though we have to survive in a series of toxic systems that are killing everything. We are collectively the only people who have the capacity to clean up these messes we are in. We are not bad, nor are we corrupt, however we may need to become strong and brave to create the heat necessary to transform the world that profits off of death. We may need to be pushed to our limits in order to change how we live, and here we practiced that just a little bit.
Actual Pure Mutation Room:
How would you like to live on this burning planet? Do you want to be a doctor, an artist, or a lawyer? The power of privilege is having access to many options. People in places like Switzerland have the option to become what they desire, to mutate as they wish. They can freeze their eggs at The Longevity Suite owned by Boris Collardi, Corrupt Swiss Investment Banker to ensure eternal life and ongoing inheritance among the few. Meanwhile the rest of the world and its people must change their lives because of genocide and war, fire, racism, famine, national border regimes, water shortage, drought, storms, and poverty. Many people in the wealthy pockets of Europe do not have to change their daily habits urgently to survive based on those same emergent(cy) forces, (though we are all changing as we eat microplastics and respond to pandemia of all types). It doesn't feel good to be in a comfy armchair in a burning oil field. It wasn't our choice. The pressure feels too high. And yet here we are.
‘At the place of transition where the Minotaur becomes man, beneath the breastbone where the ribs begin to drop away, he uses a medicinal balm. Over the years, despite his willingness to try new creams and curatives, the line remains tender, painful at times. The temperature of the scarlike ribbon and the flesh around it, bullish gray on one side, milky, translucent and human on the other, always seems a few degrees hotter than anywhere else on the Minotaur’s body, as if the fusion is still in process.’
Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break (2000, pp. 84–85)
Here's the thing generating all the heat: We have to decide how we want to change, because we also have the option not to. Where do we start on a project that we may not be built to understand? How do we begin a change that we ultimately may not benefit from in our lifetimes? Where do we go to change, the changing room? A spa? You are welcome here to meditate on our collective mutation: you know you need to change but you don't know how. We welcome you and us to change in ways that we don't understand. We think that you and we can be mutants, too.
Please place your hands in the water, and put a bit of it in the soil. Now take your contract out of your envelope. Read your agreement outloud: I am willing to lose/destroy my________ if it helps us get closer to __________.
Place the sheet of paper in one of the candles and let it catch fire. While it is lit, place it in the moist dirt. Add a bit more water on top of the flame. Make sure the flame goes out completely. You may now rest in the bath.
This prompt is derived from an exercise designed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs for The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric: Audre Lorde and Using Your Power
Original Workshop Description: Audre Lorde practiced a life and death poetics after reading the news every day. When the gap between our awareness of global crises and our power to impact global politics seems so wide. Join us for a reflective writing workshop and tune into your power to act. This workshop is for anyone excited to immerse in the legacy of Black feminist bravery.
A video of the workshop is available on the website of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: https://www.alexispauline.com/classes