Online Studium Generale lecture - Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri
Wxtch Craft lecture recording: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri
Pre(read) material
Have a look at the material provided by our guest speakers in preparation for their lecture:
PAF Performing Arts Forum is a self-organized space in the North of France in which we host a yearly-summer meeting, the Sensing Salon. In the past years many of its users came together to devise accountability as a practice to be held collectively, both in taking care of each other and in learning how to pay attention and address hurtful behaviour, so that a culture of awareness, listening and speaking up could be nurtured.
This is an ongoing experiment specific to the place that is still in process but we share here its current guidelines and list of gathered resources.
An important theme in our practice is asking art to confront things that it supposed to be beyond or outside it.
We share here Denise’s text: Reading Art As Confrontation
As a practice, reading is nothing more than ongoing re/de/composition. We share here a conversation about reading we published in 2015:
A conversation between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva
We share here Ai’s poem “Interview with a Policeman” (1987)
Because it is written from the perspective of the policeman, it allows one to see that the situation is not simple, that it can’t be posed only in terms of good and bad; that it is more complex.
Wxtch Craft lecture by Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri 'Poethical Readings'
What if, instead of providing a resolution, a direct answer, or a definite interpretation, a reading helped us to navigate the complexity of existence – attending to both its actual and virtual moments – its different positions, relationships and layers that also constitute us? Every reading exposes possibilities, reveals blockages, and shifts perspectives. Beyond the principles of non-contradiction and identity, readings design a space where multiple articulations of situations and events coexist without the imposition of a single meaning or direction.
Drawing from each other’s practices, Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva come together for experimental readings. They experiment with ‘reading tools’ inspired by well-known and newly-designed practices – such as the Tarots, Political Therapy, Palmistry, Fake Therapy as well as Reiki, Astrology and Philosophy. Belonging to the kind of knowing Walter Benjamin calls intuitive faculty and Carl G. Jung names creative thinking, these reading tools assemble images. Reading as imaging, in their practice, consists in an assembling that exposes and navigates the complex context constituting the situation, event, or problem that concerns a person or collective at a given moment and place. As such, it aims at expanding the horizon of interpretation, that is, to open up possibilities and unsettle realities.
Bio - Valentina Desideri (born in Rome, lives and works in St- Erme and Vancouver) is an artist who reads, writes and is committed to organise within different communities, including Performing Arts Forum in France. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006) and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13) and is currently a PhD student at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política.
Bio - Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. She is a professor and director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. Her art-related work includes texts for publications for the Liverpool, São Paulo and Venice Biennales, and for Documenta 14, as well as collaborations with Arjuna Neuman in the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018); and events (performances, talks, and private sessions) and texts related to Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri.
