The Yarmouth Springs Eternal project was originally born out of the context of Covid-19, a more-than-human reminder that we are not just people, but vessels for viruses, bacteria and microorganisms to thrive within and on. The project was centred on the season of Spring, while acknowledging that the predictability of the seasons is becoming more disrupted as a result of the climate and ecological emergency.

Yarmouth Springs Eternal came to life along with a community programme of artist-led walks and workshops with adults connected to the Herring House Trust group for single homeless people, and the GYROS group supporting migrants and culturally diverse communities. The workshop programme was accompanied by a six-week public exhibition and various free events including a conference, a series of artist-led walks, a printed pamphlet, and a resource booklet on creative walking activities.

In 2022, supported by CreaTures, the project took a different approach and started focusing more on the internal co-creative processes within the Yarmouth Springs Eternal community and nurturing of its community roots. The project contributors noted that the CreaTures support particularly helped them to deepen the project’s themes and engage with people in a more equitable way. A new group of facilitators was developed to build a space for unheard voices and for those with an interrupted connection to ‘home’ or place. This group grew out of long-term relationships with people connected, and returning to the project, as well as a group of new participants.

In March and April 2022, the group led by Genevieve Rudd and supported by project assistant Moyses Gomes took part in four workshops facilitated by three visiting artists and a visiting ecologist: Ligia Macedo, Holly Sandiford, Jacques Nimki and Tiffany Wallace. The workshops took place in the Great Yarmouth outdoors and in PRIMEYARC – an arts space, gallery and affordable art studios located in an ex-department store in a shopping centre.

Each of the workshops included an outdoors walk around the local neighbourhood and engaged participants – members of the community with lived experience of homelessness, migration, isolation and mental ill health – through questions about ‘nature’ and what it means to them. The goal was to explore tensions between internal and external perspectives on natural worlds: how are our inner landscapes informed by external environments, what emotions and meanings do we attach to ‘nature’? The visiting practitioners brought in their own perspectives on engaging with the natural world through arts, science and well-being approaches. 

Following the workshops, the Yarmouth Springs Eternal community participants were then supported (commissioned and paid or provided with vouchers as a reasonable expense, if accessing Universal Credit) to design and lead their own events for the public that were organised during the Creativity and Wellbeing Week in Great Yarmouth (May 2022). Four events took place and each of these was free and open-to-all, and leveraged diverse creative and walking practices to highlight the many aspects of the Great Yarmouth springtime and its ‘nature’.

The event’s activities involved slow conscious walking and breathing to notice various patterns in the local environment, mindful eating, collective writing of poems, music appreciation as well as the drawing of diverse shapes and forms to capture participants’ sensory experiences throughout. The group also engaged in ritualistic exercises of ‘making-sharing-offering’ at the local cemetery, and collected multi-lingual words of noticed feelings and objects in Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, Afrikaans and English. This exercise helped to capture and reflect on the cultural differences present in the group: for example, Ligia Macedo noted that in her home country of Portugal, cemeteries are serious and sacred spaces to honour the dead, so she was surprised to see that, in Great Yarmouth, people have picnics in the cemetery.

These events followed a particular rhythm; opening and closing each session with reflective conversations, which were noted down and recorded. A common thread throughout all events was the link between the natural environment, health and wellbeing: the group often spoke about connecting with ‘nature’ as a self-nurturing act, mentioning that it helped them feel calm or energised. Some participants mentioned their concerns about the climate and worries about the future, sharing their observations of plants flowering early or at unexpected times and feelings of anxiety about the depletion of resources.

The group did not come up with a universal definition of what ‘nature’ means to them, highlighting that such definitions might be too exclusionary. Instead, they explored the differences between the local gardened and wild spaces; between valued and neglected areas, focusing on how these distinctions mirror particular local, social conditions. The relationship between participants’ life stories and various self-seeded plants noticed around the town became a symbol of their respect for diverse journeys that we might end up taking as part of our livelihood.

At their closing session and a celebratory picnic in June 2022, the group had a conversation about vulnerability and how it can bear a powerful energy but also many uncertainties. While being vulnerable and without necessary resources and support, it can feel very exposing to step up in a social or another hierarchical system; and many members appreciated the support provided by the Yarmouth Springs Eternal project that enabled them to transition from their involvement as participants to become facilitators. The shifting of roles and hierarchies was key to the overall project dynamics: most of the contributors, including Genevieve, were involved both as participants and facilitators, sometimes even simultaneously. 

Holly Sandiford, one of the visiting artists, reflected on the deliberately loose and fluid project structure:

“As artists we often talk about ‘co-production’ and ‘collaboration’ as a way of working, but that’s often offered up as a limited choice by the facilitators. Yarmouth Springs Eternal is not just co-production, this is simply production! It is brave and bold, and puts people at the core of the project.”

The project has helped to uncover what living and working in Great Yarmouth might mean, to whom. It also enabled reflection upon the symbolism of plants growing in neglected, overlooked, bleak places, and how such places can become beautiful sites of abundant life. The Yarmouth Spring Eternal experience has been turned into a short film produced by the filmmaker Becky Demmen of Supporting Your Art:

Leading Yarmouth Springs Eternal is also tightly connected to Genevieve’s perspective of living and working in her hometown and her own lived experience of episodes of severe mental illness. From these experiences, she has drawn the strength and compassion to support the development of others facing similar challenges, acknowledging that it is a complex area of work, where generosity could push boundaries and challenge identities while, at the same time, being rich and rewarding. As pointed out by Genevieve, resources are really key and this work cannot just appear overnight, it takes a lot of time and care.

In June – July 2022, documentation of The Yarmouth Springs Eternal project was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain, along with other CreaTures experimental productions. 

This social technology is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result of The Hologram process is the construction of a robust multidimensional health network, collectively-oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive capitalism.

The Hologram’s protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s well-being as therapeutic in itself. As the racist, capitalist and patriarchal world crumbles around us, participants are invited to design long-lasting systems for support and solidarity that can ensure that our species can outlast the ongoing social, economic and planetary emergencies.

The project aims to enact a functional system for non-expert healthcare based on mutualistic support and solidarity that works towards a speculative post-capitalist future where peer cooperation is an essential value. It aims to foster people’s personal transformations within small groups through a peer-to-peer healthcare system and enable the system’s viral proliferation in broader social and geographical contexts.

The Hologram Course

Within the CreaTures context, The Hologram started with the course We must begin again: Asking for help as a new world, in which people from all over the world were invited to meet online to study and practice what it means to ask for help. The course was run in Autumn 2020, following an incubation period and exploratory workshop organised at Furtherfield’s space, as part of Cassie Thornton’s artist residency.

“We believe that destruction is making space for new beginnings and that we have no choice but to begin again. We see asking for help as a way of coming into a new world with humility, curiosity and interdependence with all beings. We want to work together with you to remind ourselves what we have been forced to forget: how to be a cooperative, interdependent species. In this project, the person who articulates their needs and asks for support can take us to a whole new world.”

– from The Hologram course invitation

In the series of six online course sessions (Sept-October 2020), 26 participants were guided through a process to remember together why and how to ask for support, and how to ensure that our supporters are supported. Together, they experimented with how to organize and value the support they need to survive and thrive in the coming new world: they practiced and discussed the social skills, values, and priorities that are central to The Hologram’s model for collective peer-to-peer healthcare.

• Each session focused on a particular topic:
• Trust and questions of Bad Support
• Atrophy of the Sharing Muscle
• Failienation
• Learning to Trust Ourselves Again
• Wishes and Time

Participants also practiced Social Presencing Theatre and experimented with their first Hologram meeting. The last session was dedicated to building a Hologram Community of Practice. Each person left the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram group.

A CreaTures member joined the course as an embedded researcher and shared autoethnographic logs of their experience throughout, giving The Hologram facilitators an invaluable participants’ perspective. This provided insights into the complex tensions and interplay between personal/individual and shared/collective experiences across the six weeks. Their reflections on the appeal (or otherwise) of certain elements of the experimental practices employed also informed the development of future courses.

The Hologram team offers several courses every year, each shaped to fit common collective needs. Outside of the CreaTures scope, multiple courses took place including, for instance, a series of courses designed especially for healthcare workers or people who identify as men.

The Hologram LARP – We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning

From inside the stillness of global lockdown, The Hologram’s viral healthcare system was used as a parafictional framework (where fiction is presented as fact) of radical planning “for the post-pandemic futures we wanted”. Through participation in this Live Action Role-Play (LARP) over two online events, twelve people made contact with who they would become, individually and collectively, by 2050.

The LARP had two related goals, offering participants an opportunity to:

“ make contact with who we want to become, individually and collectively, by 2050 [and to] see yourself as a powerful and supported being who will survive and thrive the coming emergencies and crises that await us…”.

– Cassie Thornton (2021)

The LARP was intended to provide the next level of learning and transformation through social holography.  In this immersive game, participants played characters based on the most powerful and well-supported version of themselves. They time-travelled 30 years in three weeks to enact their survival and thriving through multiple emergencies and crises. Human systems collapsed and reformed, in the wake of social upheavals borne of entrenched colonialism, racism and environmental crises. Capitalism ended.

The Hologram Community of Practice and Workbook

The Hologram Community of Practice meetings have been organised on a monthly basis via a Telegram channel and run online by community members. Connected to the community is a series of online, facilitated, two hour-long sessions called Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH). In these sessions, one of The Hologram peer-facilitators walks newcomers through the basic ideas of the project to explain how each part of the social holography process works, and how to have transformative and supportive conversations.

Eleven MVH facilitators have been trained so far to support people in their first Hologram session. The community has been collaborating on a full programme of developments and aims to sustain the practice and network beyond 2023, when Cassie Thornton plans to step down as the creative lead of the project. A summary video provides a glimpse into the MVH sessions: 

The Hologram Workbook (Starter Kit for Anti-Capitalist Futures) was created to provide easy answers to the question: What is The Hologram and how do you use it? This short illustrated manual (translated into 5 different languages) walks incomers through the first steps of starting their Hologram group and is intended as an accompaniment to the support received from another practitioner who is familiar with The Hologram protocol.

The Hologram Film

The Hologram film directed by Thornton and produced and edited by Jonathan Lee, attempts to model the Hologram practice and its use both online and offline. It also reveals the radical proposal underneath the practice, which is that many people can simultaneously create an expanding network of contributors who are healthy and stable enough to survive and thrive through the end of capitalism, and to make new ways of organising human cooperation with what is found in the rubble. The film consists of a simulation of the Hologram protocol performed by people who are a part of the large community of practitioners using The Hologram practice in their life. 

The Hologram film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at an exhibition, workshop and video launch event at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology as part of the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (July 2022).

In the nine months following The Hologram course, numerous events took place. Community members ran two more Hologram courses, eleven people set up their own Holograms, while 35 people joined The Hologram Community of Practice on Telegram and 36 people joined a new, monthly Community of Practice meeting. 40 people also signed-up and participated in Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH) taster sessions that enable people to create their own care clusters. These MVH programmes were developed with a specific focus on diversity. The Hologram also received significant additional funding and support through other social and cultural organisations. A website and community forum were created and populated by networks of The Hologram participants.

The idea of DOMIE goes against gentrification; exposing the ‘ruin’ that resulted from the Polish transformation after 1989 – the rapid change of systems, neglect of memory and responsibility. In such conditions, there is a need to support the weakest groups and enhance ideas of solidarity. View from the Window focuses on building neighbourly relations across difference, by hosting picnics, creating an urban garden together, moving away cars and making a safer space to spend time together. The aim is to establish relations through social and creative exchange with an environmental focus.

DOMIE is a single standing house in the yard of Św. Marcin – the most famous street of Posnań city. After 1989, the building and the yard were abandoned and became a ruin. The building was previously an important cultural site: for instance, it hosted a Fotoplastykon or Kaiser’s Panorama (an early precursor to cinema). Since 2018, an artist collective has taken over the building, creating a social, artistic, economic and architectural experiment in collective and cooperative care. The artists and youth of DOMIE are considered a foreign element in the neighbourhood, a threat to the old order and regime.

The View From the Window project aims to help create a dialogue between the local neighbours and the new inhabitants of DOMIE, since they may not have the tools to acknowledge that they can gain something from each other. Both communities deal with traumas, poverty, and loneliness. Creative engagements in overcoming the obstacles together and treating them as opportunities can help build such bridges and cultivate a sense of trust. In 2022, the war in Ukraine has brought a new context to the project, as many refugees have become new members of the neighbourhood.

A series of weekly Sunday picnics in the front yard of DOMIE was started in March 2022, inviting all local neighbours to come share a meal, spend a Sunday afternoon together, and get to know each other. Printed posters and an online DOMIE group invited neighbours to spend some time together eating cake and drinking coffee. During the picnic meetings (March – May 2022) a conversation was started about the possible futures of the DOMIE yard, which is currently in terrible condition: it is a disorganised parking lot full of trash, with an uncontrolled toilet, and a place of daily alcohol use. It was discussed how to turn the yard into an urban garden together, move away the cars, and how to create a safer space for spending more time together. The neighbours brought in various ideas and engaged in work for the benefit of the common yard, helping to build the emerging community.

Six picnics at DOMIE

The first picnic gathering was attended mostly by elderly people and people in alcoholic crises. They brought their flatmates, family members and friends. Time was spent talking about the yard: telling each other who we are, how we ended up here, what is the status of the neighbourhood, and what do we expect from the Sunday picnics series. One neighbour came and brought sweets. Many people who came to attend – Janusz, Halina, Daniel, Bogusław, Felicja, Wilku and Maciej – kept coming back for further picnics throughout the series and stayed through to the end of the process. The basic bond was created during the very first meeting. 

During the first picnic, Martyna handed out postcards mentioning that she would be thankful if the neighbours could send pictures of DOMIE taken from their window/balcony, so that they could be used in a public exhibition situated inside of DOMIE. By collecting diverse local views of the ruin, the hope was to support the process of building trusted neighbourhood relationships.

This idea was inspired by the DOMIE’s unique architecture: When photographed from above, due to the unusual shape of its roof, DOMIE visually resembles the first photography ever taken by Nicephore Niepce in Le Gras (France). By playing with the visual connotation of DOMIE in relation to the local neighbourhood context, there was a desire to cultivate the feeling of something dear and beautiful: something connected to memories and storytelling, portraying the house as a place that should be taken care of and treated as a treasure that belongs to all in the neighbourhood. In the following week, Martyna collected several first photographs that were sent via messages and email. 

During the second picnic meeting, more people appeared, including those from Ukraine and other places abroad. Mirek, Daniel, Vasylj, Marta and others were there and took part in a mapping workshop led by Marta Węglińska from the KOBALT Migrating Platform. Together, they created a map of ideas, functions and needs concerning the yard.

For the third meeting, visualisations and plans for the yard were brought along. This had been prepared together with an architectural studio and reflected the ideas shared by locals at the previous picnic. During the picnic, participants shared reflections and experiences: Janusz told the group that he missed them, he claimed they appeared in his dreams over the week, Mirek spoke a lot about his brother in jail and he also offered to help renovate parts of the DOMIE building. Maciej proposed the idea of painting a DOMIE sign on one of the house walls; he was also very interested in the Fotoplastykon story connected to DOMIE – he had gotten himself a book about it and shared various interesting facts about the place and its history. We planted a rose together that was brought during one of the earlier picnics. 

Sadly, no one from the old group came for the fourth picnic but many new people appeared including new friends from Ethiopia, Abdi and Tebarek, and immigrant neighbours Ramzi and Rauf. During the fifth picnic, DOMIE was hosting an exhibition by 17 refugee girls from Lviv, Kharkiv and Kiyv (Ukraine). Neighbours who came for the picnic joined the exhibition, and the exhibition artists later joined the picnic. There were musicians from the DOMIE neighbourhood playing live music and the picnic lasted until late. New forms of engagement emerged, connecting the cultural production inside the DOMIE space with the picnic events.

The sixth picnic welcomed more newcomers from local cultural institutions and grassroots initiatives. Neighbours came to the picnic to grab a coffee and spend their time working on the forthcoming exhibition showcasing their ‘view from the window’ photographs of DOMIE. 40 pictures of DOMIE were collected altogether. These were taken from various windows and balconies: some by the local inhabitants, and some by Martyna as several locals (Rauf, Antonina, Michał and Ramzi) invited her to visit their homes and take pictures.

Exhibitions & Zine

Based on these pictures a map was co-created. This documented where the picnic participants live and helped to nurture and establish new relations. The map was presented as part of the DOMIE exhibition and in a zine publication that was printed on a risograph and released in Polish and English translations (100 copies in total, released in June 2022).

Along with all these activities, the View From the Window project helped to establish and maintain new, friendly relationships and bonds within the local neighbourhood – one that is commonly considered as a divided and ‘problematic’ area. The neighbourhood picnics and conversations about participants’ childhood memories of the place uncovered interesting moments from the history of DOMIE (such as those related to the Fotoplastykon) and provoked a collective repair of the ruined building. The project managed to create a sense of shared local space and shared neighbourly futures, where the local community enacts collective care. 

Aside from the DOMIE exhibition, the View from the Window project, including photo documentation and the printed zine publication, was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).

Andrew Gryf Patterson, in collaboration with several other members of the Pixelache association, sought to explore how the association has developed and sustained its internal organisational practice. By engaging with organisational meta-data, the Pixelache office as a tangible memory device, and the production of two audio zines, they gathered perspectives from active members reflecting upon how the organisation has transformed internally over the course of its existence. 

The creative research process within the Pixelache project involved an extensive mapping of the association’s history and its internal organisational practices over the 20 years of its existence, which resulted in the production of two audio zines. This process consisted of several stages, including: background research into organisational metadata, a workshop focused on gathering materials for the zines, and a production of a project website to host the zines and other project outcomes.  

Background research into organisational metadata

The first stage in the process (January – February 2022) was a compilation of festival and member metadata over the 20 years as reference, followed by the production of a handmade Gantt-style chart of past and present association members. The compiled data was used to build a timeline of main Pixelache events, moments of internal transformation and a generational map of key members and their roles in sustaining the association.

While the existing Pixelache website and content management were a record and source of information to consider, so too were digital organisational documents and portfolio reports. This metadata was gathered as a backbone of factual information upon which narratives could be based or problematised. Throughout the process, the work-group focused on the available data as well as on the ‘gaps’ and what possibly got lost in the association’s history documentation over the time, asking: What could we gather to assist our memory? What was sustainable and what was lost in the process?

Tracing the participation of members allowed a glimpse into patterns on, and offered a reference point for personnel changes in the association. The internal movements in the association implied that roles like producer, board member, or artistic director were accessible to any member with the motivation and will to take them on. This information, of course, did not reflect intersections such as: who feels entitled to take roles, internal dynamics, or other intersections. It allowed, though, to see general changes, like the nationalities and gender of members and producers, and to detect general dynamics in terms of content, interests, and strategies.

From the metadata compiled in the timeline and generational map, the next step was to identify other artefacts (events, objects, narratives) from the association’s history that were useful in co-creating an overview of Pixelache’s internal transformations. This included consideration of the ways in which the association responded to these transformations, and what the impact was of these changes.

Audio zine material gathering workshop

As new association members from 2021, Irina Mutt and Sumugan Sivanesan were invited to lead a workshop with Pixelache members and other interested persons to focus on making collective ‘fanzine’-style audio vignettes or anecdotes capturing key moments from Pixelache’s history (March 2022). By choosing this method – recording situated audio narratives in a quick, unstructured way – these audio vignettes were aimed to encourage further in-depth engagements with Pixelache’s archival documents and online content management system.

The two-day workshop was undertaken as an internal ‘social association memory event’ in the Pixelache production office, in Suvilahti Cultural complex, Helsinki, on 25-26th March 2022. Pixelache members were invited (via members mailing list) to “meet, have some talks, organise materials and check what items, memories and resources we have in the office”. The intention was to consider the sustainability and internal transformations of the association over time, with regards to the things, artefacts or objects that carry traces of Pixelache’s key events and recall transformations in the organisation of cultural programming. 

Due to the length of time that the association has existed, this inevitably involved facing the fragmentation, density, non-linearity of, and of course gaps in, data. This begged a question on the type of stories that could be possibly told about arts associations with a complex and extensive history like Pixelache’s. There is the challenge of what remains materially of associational activity, and what members of an organisation remember or forget over time.

It was speculated that the Pixelache production office was itself an interface device, a container of objects with various usages at different times, a non-linear and non-organised archive, full of tangible data. Being on-site, it was possible to trigger memories relating to Pixelache, in a sort of ‘Proustian madeleine’ process, allowing a more playful approach to the idea of archive: objects as traces surrounded by different stories, where these stories are subjective ways to recall the past. This enabled reflection on, and questioning of, whether there is any objectivity in archives, data or statistics

Interview & workshop data analysis

Following the workshop, it was identified that the information gathered in the Pixelache office missed certain voices of recent producers and board members. Several additional interviews during April 2022 were conducted with the most recent generation of active members according to their availability, focusing mostly on Pixelache festivals and experiences between 2013-2019. Irina, Sumugan and Andrew then worked together to select and edit the workshop conversations and interviews into the audio zine format (May 2022). The editing process led to the arrangement of narrative themes around two main clusters, which was further complemented by a selection of related artefacts from the Pixelache office ‘archive’ that came up in the conversations.

The first thematic cluster was decentralisation, and its relationship to the festival production, its rotating co-directorship model, and related socio-economical aspects of cultural work. It was recognized that burn-out of social organisational energy, which paradoxically also allowed space for new persons to take on curatorial roles, was an important factor in why the organisation has kept going for so long in the past decades.

The second thematic cluster was community and the diversity of disciplines, practice backgrounds and experiences, and how this related to expectations of what the association has been doing together. Resulting from the thematic clustering are the two audio zines: Decentralisation, Burn-out & Hijack and Communities of Practices. 

The Pixelache zines

🔊 Decentralization, Burn-out & Hijack

This audiozine pastes together conversation around ET grilling, open camp model, festival activity in 2013-2015, decentralisation within the association, changing production teams, burn out, and the semi-serious ‘positive hijacking’ taking Pixelache forwards. Featured objects in the office include liquid smoke, a fabric scheduling device, a megaphone, and a hacked exercise bike.    

🔊 Communities of practices

This audiozine pastes together conversation around organisational labour, friendships and motivations, changing disciplines within Pixelache with the recent years, the festival in 2019, safer space ambitions, things left behind, and a need to collectively imagine future desires. Featured objects include the internal ‘pixel’ currency used to partially compensate association member’s work, a 3D printer, a bedside artwork, and safe space guidelines.

Dissemination

As a public dissemination platform to circulate the zines and other research documentation (images, links, text vignettes), an interactive page on the existing Pixelache’s website was created.

The Pixelache audio zines together with other creative and research artefacts were exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022).