ICE (Intentional Community in Exile) is a fresh new mutual aid society, built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system. ICE breaks with the assumption that the objective of this life is a house with a nuclear/biological family, through accumulation of personal property, or individual recognition. ICE is being made by a small group of precarious transient anti-capitalist women trying to survive together while being literally and metaphorically evicted. Please join us on September 18, for a discussion and a performance of life practices as well as frameworks for material and immaterial mutual support. This project is about finding ways to exit economic precarity by building human relationships instead of accumulating capital-- to make exile ‘warm.’


The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources. 

Risograph flyer designed & printed by David Wilson



ARTIST BIO

Feminist Economics Department: Cassie Thornton is a feminist economist and artist. In her newest work, she turns towards the development of experimental techniques for healing the social and biomedical wounds that result from surviving smash and grab capitalism. These techniques are meant to support the development of collective powers for those made weak, invisible, sick and isolated by capitalism, so those who have been trampled may begin to heal and generate the ideas and practices for a benevolent future society. Her long term research-based social-practice reveals the impact of financial and social debts on individual and public affect, behaviour, and unconscious. Through exhibitions, independent projects and performances, Cassie works closely with many individuals as well as cultural, academic, and activist organizations as an invited –or not– facilitator of scorpionic chaos. Through rigorous irrational processes, her aim is to help people see their individual failings or weaknesses as the fruit that grows in the ecosystem of hate produced by a predatory economic system. By offering services that liberate people from feeling like failures with no real value, Cassie makes clear that our private experiences of inadequacy or failure are parts of large political and social failings. The long game is to help people see these political and social failings as puzzles, which everyone can and must cooperate on socially instead of through years of expensive therapy and stretching. To bring people into this sense of social possibility and action, Cassie offers experimental services like debt visualizations, alternative credit reports, wall demolition, and feminist economics yoga. Each of these practices invite participants to see and adopt a post-capitalist logic where power comes from the grassroots, and responsibility is to people and land instead of capital.

Alongside Max Haiven, Cassie is a founding member of University of the Phoenix, a for-profit school for the dead. Together with Max, she is also co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.