Our fall 2022 residents Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri use a preliminary deck of the Echo Tarot Deck, a new deck of Tarot cards they are creating while in residency at Amant to perform a Poethical Reading.

In their collaborative practice, Valentina and Denise experiment with ‘reading tools’ inspired by well-known and newly designed practices–such as the Tarot, Political Therapy, Palmistry, Fake Therapy as well as Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy.

What if–they ask–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 many possible positionings, deep connections, and unexpected layerings?

Rehearsing the kind of knowing Walter Benjamin calls ‘intuitive faculty’ and Carl G. Jung names ‘creative thinking’, they view reading as imaging. In their practice, reading takes the form of an assembling that exposes and navigates the complexity of a situation, event, or problem that concerns a person or collective at a given moment and place. While performing this type of ‘poethical’ reading, they aim at expanding the horizon of thinking, opening the range of possibilities, unsettling unquestioned realities, and allowing for other kinds of questions to guide existence.

Every reading exposes possibilities, reveals blockages, and shifts perspectives. Beyond the principles of non-contradiction and identity, ‘poethical’ readings redesign any given situation in a way that allows for multiple articulations of situations and events to coexist without the imposition of a single meaning or direction.

This event is part of our For Your Reference, in which our residents present a key method, text, or other reference and share it with the audience in an open conversation. The reading is free and open to all, and will be followed by an informal reception at 306 Maujer.