11th World Congress of the Hedonist International

Apart from providing free health care, ASMR extracts the doctor from
the hospital, the bodyworker from the self-care industry, the artists
from making symbolic gestures, the visitor from passivity, the health
activist from making speeches, the healer from a hushed atmosphere
and has them practice in a public space side by side. This leads to new
formats of health support and to dissolving the “expert’s” ability to
assume a distanced impersonal position. In our sessions, the
“treatment” often flows equally between the practitioners and the
incomer.
We identify with the principles of "pirate care": “Care is a complex,
relational, and intentional set of practices that thrives on shared
knowledge and collective wisdom. Yet, one way care work is
devalued is through the myth that it is simple, unskilled or
instinctual. The knowledges that underpin our collective capacity to
care are increasingly walled off, treated as property by capital. As
seen in the patenting of seeds and the sabotage of the right to repair,
intellectual property turns communal resources into private assets,
restricting access to vital insights and tools. To care is to rebel
against these enclosures and insist that knowledge is a common, as
our survival depends on it. Against such backdrop, struggles over
knowledge in all of its facets - who gets to learn what and how, under
which conditions, and with what consequences and costs- are all
essential dimensions of pirate care."