Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri

Since 2015, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri have been experimenting with the Sensing Salon, a studio practice that expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Through formats that facilitate collaborative studying and experimenting with different practices and tools for reading (tarot and astrology) and healing (reiki and political therapy), the Sensing Salon enables thinking about political and social issues in a way that attends to the emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of existence. For the past three years they have been developing the Echo Tarot Deck, a new tool for reading inspired by Ai Ogawa’s poetry. During their residency at Amant, they will further develop this research through study sessions that include individual readings as well as group conversations about reading, the four elements (Earth, Water, Air, and Fire), and the corresponding physical, emotional, intellectual, and inspirational moments of a person’s existence.

Denise is a philosopher, writer, and filmmaker. Her academic and artistic works address the ethical and political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagável (2019), Unpayable Debt (2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her artistic work includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman.

Valentina explores artmaking as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance, fine arts and is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She provides fake therapy and political therapy, and she co-organizes Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in France. Denise and Valentina are members of the online platform ehcho.org. The Sensing Salon has been shown at Kunstverein Hamburg, Kadist (Paris), The Showroom (London), Arika (Glasgow), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hangar (Lisbon), and Artspeaks (Vancouver) among others.

Image of a session of the Sensing Salon. Photo by Hervé Veronese, Centre Pompidou.