Poethical Readings: Intuiting the Political with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri

What if, instead of providing a resolution, a direct answer, or a definite interpretation, a reading helped us to navigate the complex reality, 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 Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri 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. Relying on the kind of knowing that Walter Benjamin calls mimetic (intuitive) faculty and Carl G Jung associative thinking, these tools assemble a reading or an image. 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.

How does it work? Each session, attended by an individual or small group (5 people maximum), will last for about 30 minutes. There is no need to come with a well-defined question. For 'the question' can also come up during an initial reading and it can be further narrowed or expanded when addressed by other tools.