Collective social research integrates Workers’ Inquiry with a peer to peer health practice, The Hologram, to reflect on power and money for tech and culture workers in the apocalypse
In the Workers’ Aquarium we recognize that as cultural workers we have no idea what to do in relation to multiple overlapping crises. No one does. In this way, we are all in the same water together trying to figure out how to breathe. I started this artist residency at Trust, organized by GameChanger, wanting to talk to people around the residency about something that feels unspeakable, but which is constantly on my mind: What is meaningful work in the apocalypse?
At the beginning of what was meant to be a 2 month residency, I co-developed a new method with Jamie Woodcock that combines two radical question-asking practices for collaborative research and transformation: Workers’ Inquiry and The Hologram. Worker’s Inquiry is an established Marxist method of mobilizing (factory) workers by asking them about the conditions at their workplace and at home. The Hologram is a relatively new, viral self-organized peer-to-peer protocol in which people support others’ health over a long term by becoming each other’s living medical records.
At the beginning of what was meant to be a 2 month residency, I co-developed a new method with Jamie Woodcock that combines two radical question-asking practices for collaborative research and transformation: Workers’ Inquiry and The Hologram. Worker’s Inquiry is an established Marxist method of mobilizing (factory) workers by asking them about the conditions at their workplace and at home. The Hologram is a relatively new, viral self-organized peer-to-peer protocol in which people support others’ health over a long term by becoming each other’s living medical records.
Using this new, hybrid methodology, I facilitated five meetings of four people each in the winter of 2022/23 in Berlin, online. I invited anyone around the residency to participate in these sessions facilitated by me. This meant that I invited people from Trust, as well as the curators of GameChanger, and the people who I work with on The Hologram. These three groups of people who all feel like they are quite different types of fish got together in the Workers’ Aquarium to talk about power and money, which we all struggle with in different ways.