We, Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva, met in Naples back in the spring of 2011. Very soon in our first meeting it became evident that we shared an orientation in our separate explorations of knowledge practices and tools - Tarot, Astrology, Alchemy, Palmistry, Reiki - which are, in different ways, related to healing and meaning.
Each of us, we found, had been experimenting with how these tools enable thinking about political and social issues in a way that also takes into account what are usually called emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of existence. More significantly, we both were already experimenting with these tools and practices’ capacity to complexify and amplify the ways of thinking and existing and corresponding ways of acting politically and ethically.
A few weeks after that first meeting, we started on a collaboration that has further reinforced our common view about the role these tools could play in our present circumstances.
For the past ten years, whether as part of our collaborative practices (The Sensing Salon) or when asked by individuals and institutions, we have developed our unique approach to working with these tools. Every and each one of these occasions has provided us and those with/for whom we had the opportunity to experiment with, a mode of relating that does not privilege or reproduce the self-oriented, solitary, and ultimately pained figure of the Ego or the Subject.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher, writer, and artist. Her artistic work includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She is a Reiki Master, who was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓ əm) people.
Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance. Her practice include Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France, speculations in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers the Sensing Salon with Denise Ferreira da Silva. She is a Reiki Master, who was born in Rome, and currently lives and works in Lisbon.