When was Thyself Agency formed, and what sparked its creation?
Thyself Agency was born from a moment of deep experimentation and existential despair.
Thinking of solving this with that, our first agent went to Beirut to exchange his life with another person. For a week each one lived in the other’s shoes; literally exchanging everything and enjoying what life showed them, through that bizarre experience.
It was 2011, after 10 years the agency was born, in an attempt to realize the possibility of an experience and to transmit the desire for it. Instead of telling it or creating content about it, we make it live for real.
Thyself Agency is a travel agency, we organize expeditions into the unknown, where we practice maieutics through three specific exercises. So each participant became a candidate and an agent, each one played a fundamental role and the meaning discovered in the journey united everyone in sharing a mystical friendship.
What principles are at the core of your work?
We organize three types of trips, each trip is in the form of an exercise: Life Exchanging is the exercise that takes place between two candidates who exchange everything about their lives, each living in the other’s shoes. It lasts a week.
It is intense and radical, it unleashes the truthful imagination.
The 9 Days Week is a correction of the sleep/wake cycle and allows you to live 9 days within a week. This is ideal for those who always work, it gives you more time and a good reason to be fired, since some days start with light and others with darkness.
The third exercise is done with the Glasses, a device that we have modified to be able to see ourselves from the outside in real time, we use it in everyday life, so we can eat while seeing ourselves eating, love while seeing ourselves loving and live while seeing ourselves living. These three exercises manipulate the perception of the three elements that are at the base of the materialist illusion: Identity, time and space.
The only prerequisite for participating is to be alive.
By doing these exercises, you discover the principles.
In what moments or situations do individuals typically seek out your agency?
In moments of crisis, which nowadays seem to be more and more frequent, surfing the wave of the 2000 psychic epidemic, today’s adults have developed hostages of this word: crisis. Was it a fault that we wanted to grow up?
We are developing the tools to really know ourselves and create environments where normality can truly express itself: normality is health.
Inspired by the sensitivity of artists, we have tried to exasperate the contradictions of our time and our desire, so when one of us found himself working from Monday to Friday with the weekend as the only time to cultivate his vocation, the desire to have two Sundays was transformed into a real practice.
Since we were born, we are taught to protect and cultivate our freedom as the highest possible value, but reality then shows it to us mutilated and sacrificed on the altar of society and profit. As if our life did not really belong to us, not entirely, but if life is not mine then let it not be mine anymore and I exchange it with others.
The simplicity of what happens next must be discovered in person.
One of the assistance you offer involves ‘exchanging lives.’ What kinds of transformations have you seen through the latter? Have clients ever returned to their original selves (were they happy), or is there anyone who never went back?
Life Exchange, the writer’s favorite exercise.
We have done exchanges of many types, between strangers, between friends, partners, husband and wife, a girl exchanged with her dog, everything is designed for the specific case.
Imagine a life exchange between two strangers: an appointment is made between the two candidates and an agent, there the two meet for the first time and read the Persona Lists (a document where each one describes himself following pre-compiled entries), they exchange personal effects and each one reaches the other’s house, when they wake up the exchange has begun, a week passes and when they wake up the exchange is over, and they all meet again at the starting point.
What happens during the week is subsequently told by the candidates in a report published on our website www.thyself.agency/journal
.
What is the role of agents?
The agency does not interact with the candidates during the trip, our job is to solve possible practical problems.
For the rest, it is the exercise that expresses itself and influences the candidates until they abandon themself.
This is what we seek, abandonment, exit from ourselves, we exasperate perdition to its extreme consequences, to the point of renouncing every distraction, until we are left alone in front of ourselves, reduced to the bare minimum, to the point of losing ourselves in our own eyes and being the drop that becomes an ocean.
Can you elaborate on your approach to eliminating behavioural automatism? Why is this such a crucial aspect of your work?
All that matters is awareness, by eliminating automatisms with the suggestion given by the exercises we become aware of them. In this way, there is no escape from reality, from commitments or duties, liberation comes from the power over oneself given by the knowledge of oneself, impossible to obtain it by unconsciously living the dependence on behaviors.
There is an extreme impediment to personal fulfilment given by ignorance towards oneself, through our exercises we try to eliminate distractions, we clean up and allow that knowledge to be realized. We apply the right amount of pressure to get a controlled shock, so that innate abilities are activated in those who participate, it always happens, it is the agency that manifests itself and becomes life.
It is then up to those who participate to choose what to do with what they have learned.
Our work is not for profit or entertainment, it is all free and real.
It aims at abandonment, it gives awareness.
It lives in the dirt and cleans.
Your office is located at Viale dell’Innovazione 3, second floor. What was significant about choosing this space? How would you describe the office’s aesthetic and atmosphere?
The office is a temporary and itinerant info point. From here we organize our work and welcome people, we talk, we think together, we use the Glasses. We try to look within ourselves in ways that are suitable for us, we start from the bottom of a swamp and we cannot rely on common sense to get back to the surface, there is no professional or authority that can respond to our needs, who should be the professional of my faith?
Thyself Agency was born as an artistic project because it is made by artists, but it is open to the world, instead of exhibitions we organize agency info points in the places where we are invited, we rely a lot on the flow of coincidences, we have been to several cities, now we are in Milano and we can go wherever there is a reason.
We also work in schools, in companies, on the street, at home, we are looking for truth everywhere: the truth is the only cure.
What are three extraordinary things you’ve experienced or witnessed at the beginning of 2025, either within the agency or in the broader art world?
The balances change, but we have found clarity in the confusion.
The answers are always inside.
Another world is possible.
Address and contact:
Thyself Agency
Viale dell’Innovazione 3, Milano
www.thyself.agency
Erka Shalari is a Vienna-based art writer. Her work is committed to uncovering distinctive artistic positions in contemporary art. The work methodology is strongly influenced by psychology, epistemological works, as well as affects and rituals.