Making portals and jumping through
Two ingredients for de-centralization, part 1.
This is a transcript of the opening and closing ritual for the sixth General Assembly of Hologram organizers called U.G.H. [United Groundskeepers of Hologram]. UGH is the main manifestation of our years of effort to de-centralize the project and have it escape the gravity of the Art World. In this assembly, I, Magda, passed on my position of the holder of this assembly to the next Administrix, Shaneal, and became just another rank member.
OPENING: PORTALS
I guess I always wished I would end up here, but I could have never imagined it…
I have written a fair number of songs and poems about the Hologram, and the many things I learned through it, over the past years. Here is one of the first ones, called Portal. I must have written it some time in the spring of 2021, the second pandemic spring. This is after I officially started working with Cassie, helping her hold the project and build its infrastructure. It was the time when we realized maybe the wish for a viral network was coming true.
This year, one of the things that peeked my imagination in a big way was a mathematical equation that Shaneal taught me. With its help, you can count how many individual one-on-one connections, relationships, there are in any given group
x = [N(N-1)/2]
where x is the number of relationships in the group and N is the number of people
So, for instance, in the U.G.H. zoom call, there were 12 organizers, which means there were 66 relationships at play. Or, in our Hologram Telegram chat, there are currently 306 people with the potential to have 46.665 different connections.
For me, the highest goal of our dream of de-centralization hasn’t been some abstract moral achievement of “flat hierarchies”. De-centralization means being able to see each other, and be witnessed in this collective, as the special, weird and complicated creatures we each are. My hope has been to get to a place where we are not flattened by our positions, identity or the “power” that we hold. Instead, I wish for us to be comrades, which includes seeing each other at our not best, yet still assuming the best intentions. It means working on things together rather than submitting complaints to each other as if one of us is the authority and the other their customer. Most importantly, de-centralization has been the dream to see and support each other in changes, mutating alongside each other into the strangest, most exciting, bravest iterations of ourselves.
But it’s not easy to see each other. Even though I consider building and maintaining relationships as one of my life’s Works, I often get too exhausted. I feel like Sisyphus, the guy who has been forever pushing a boulder up the hill in the Greek Underworld only for it to always slip and roll down right before he reaches the peek. According to the legend, one of his main crimes was breaking the sacred hospitality tradition. Plus, cheating death.
This is a portal I made for myself and Cassie when I started working for real on The Hologram with her. It is cut out from a lid of one of those hot food takeout plates. It was the second pandemic spring. I made one tiny circle for myself and I sent Cassie the other one to Canada through post. Portals like these are really good when communication through zoom, long phone call walks, emails and voice notes just don’t feel right.
Nearly anything can be a portal, it doesn’t even have to be a circle. They can look like pins, candles, mugs, books, postcards, pieces of swapped clothing, etc etc. We can have a whole network of them. For al the 46.665 relationships.
When I made this portal, I still called myself a curator. In fact, it was Cassie who taught me how to make them. We met back in 2018, when I was still firmly planted in the Art World. I loved Cassie’s project Strike Debt in which, in the disguise of art, she gave people “false” credit reports to help them get real housing in the rapidly gentrified San Francisco area. I invited her to have an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. There, among other things, she made a gigantic portal to a world into which all the marginalized people escaped to do their own thing, have their own economy, their own book stores and art schools, when they finally got very, very bored of this world’s dudeshit.
Visitors were supposed to stand on a mark on the floor, which instructed them to:
When you squint your eyes, can you see how the illusion of many people learning to organize their own support became true? Have you ever felt changed by the attention given to you by three people in a way that made it hard to go back to the world outside of this portal?
After the past three years with The Hologram, I don’t know what exactly I should call myself. I used to be a curator. I’m still a curator. Except one with a gallery in their bedroom and most time spent in movement organizing. Except one that doesn’t believe anymore that talking about something creates change. I’m also something else. I have been through a portal, for sure.
I remembered that as a warmup, we often used to ask people attending Hologram workshops to introduce themselves by sharing what would be their post-capitalist job. We used it not only as a way to get to know each other but also to start thinking about what we would do if our work and time wouldn’t be connected to our survival. What made us feel useful? How did we want to spend time with/for/around others? My two most frequent answers were: a firefighter and a steward of a transition house, a place where people would go to both recover from and get the guts to start a big life change.
My best guess is I’m currently somewhere on the swirly line from a cultural worker to that firefighting change agitator.
My best guess is The Hologram is somewhere on that swirly line too -moving from its original myth to a tool that will be used by people to support each other in overthrowing the pipelines leaking poison all over the Earth, our hospital.
I couldn’t have done it alone. We can’t do it alone. So, my provocation for you is to start making portals. There is no authority to lean on, it’s just us.