Reading with Echo

Reading with Echo is an experiment in collaborative creation, that Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva have been developing for the past five years.

Each and every reading, in their view, is informed by other readings that have taken place and also each and every reading is already (a possible, potential, or virtual) part of readings to come. This is because while Tarot readers may develop their own ways of reading a spread and interpreting a card, these will be already influenced by previous Tarot readings or what she or he may have read in a book or online.

Poethical Readings, the initial form of their collaboration, is oriented by the question of how to image ethics with/out the modern subject. The practice experiments with symbolic tools, including astrology, philosophy, palm reading, herbal healing, fake therapy, political therapy, Reiki, and the Tarot. Each session creates a space for a collective reading of an image, which captures the inseparability of the political and ethical dimensions of a personal, a collective, or global situation or question.

The Sensing Salon, the studio practice they have designed, expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Through formats that facilitate collaborative study and experiment with practices and tools for reading and healing, the Sensing Salon fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.

The Echo Tarot Deck embodies the very idea of reading that characterizes their practice, both Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon. This exhibition gathers the various moments of a five-year long process. The deck has been inspired by poethical readings of Ai Ogawa’s poems, in which we use Tarot spreads and Reiki sessions to assemble the meaning of each card as well as of the deck itself. It differs greatly from the traditional tarot decks, not so much in content but in terms of its ethical presuppositions. Instead of a linear trajectory of self-actualization (self-development) represented by The Magician, in the Echo deck, the Major Arcana combine into a complex composition while, in the Minor Arcana, instead of sequentiality (and its sense of development) the cards signal elementality (and its sense of implicancy). Overall the deck foregrounds materiality, as transformability, for it allows us to image the ethical, through the inseparability of the emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the corporeal.

Events taking place as part of Reading with Echo

Sat, June 8th 6 pm – 8 pm Reading with Echo – Tarot Reading Workshop
Visual artists and researchers Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva invite you to a workshop of Poethical Readings. For more info click here

Sat, June 8th 9 pm Join us for the Official Opening of the Reading with Echo Exhibition at Galway Arts Centre.

Sat, June 8th 9:30 pm – 11 pm Disquiet Nights Late-Night Series present – Reading with Echo
Artists and researchers Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva will host a live Poethical Reading using the Echo Tarot Deck that will be of particular significance to Galway City. For more info click here

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), an MA in Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a BA in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London). She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings, gathers Sensing Salons and Reading with Echo with Denise Ferreira da Silva, amongst many other collaborations. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org.

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at the University of New York. Her work artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.  She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)  Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). He also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux