ASMR is a mutualist clinic experimenting with offering free high quality health care in third spaces. The project originated in April 2025 at the Casino for Social Medicine, where it offered a week intensive, then three months-long program in which different health care practitioners, doctors, healers, body workers, layman specialists, researchers, and health autonomy organizers provided their services in the space of the cafe.
We now operate on a 3 months cycle, meaning we open our clinic for 3 months every friday, with assemblies once a month to check in and care for the practitioners. After each cycle we take a break to reflect, support each other with feedback from those using our offerings and constructive critic. We want to learn from each other, that is why our clinic is called a “school”.
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.
