Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva: The Sensing Salon

Between January 14 and 18, 2020, Hangar Center for Artistic Research, Lisbon and Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon organize The Sensing Salon, an ongoing research project by Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in the framework of KADIST’s three-year project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.

The Sensing Salon is a studio practice, conceived by Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, 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 (e.g. Tarot and Astrology) and healing (e.g. Reiki and Political Therapy), it fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.

For this occasion, The Sensing Salon will assume a two-parts format: a private study group (with guests) during four days (Tuesday, January 14 to Friday, January 17) which will culminate in the group’s open-sharing of the process of Friday 17 January evening and a one-day public symposium, on Saturday, January 18. The study group will gather artists and theoreticians Jota Mombaça, Kobe Matthys/Agency, Mark Harris, Stacey Ho, Corazon del Sol and Raquel Lima as well as Lisbon-based artists, curators and activists. Together they will depart from the question that closes Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s film Serpent Rain (2016): “what would become of the human if expressed through the elements?” A question inspired by the sense that the grip the metaphysics of linearity (and its attendant onto-epistemological descriptors, such as separability and fixity) has on our imagination accounts for the prevalence of violence in modern global existence.

The project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All, conceived by KADIST, Paris, and curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, spans over three years (2017–20). It focuses on Europe as a geographic and conceptual framework, and reflects on the dehumanisation that characterises many of the activities that humans have been doing in the name of “humanity” continuously and throughout various forms. The Sensing Salon is the last artistic commission in a series of three, the previous ones include the collaborations with Lumbardhi Foundation in Prizren, Kosovo on the project Europa Enterprise initiated by Andreja Duganđžić, Jelena Petrović and Lala Raščić, and with Netwerk in Aalst and Contour Biennale 9 in Mechelen, Belgium on the project The Empire of Law by Daniela Ortiz.

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. She is a professor and director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia.

Valentina Desideri is an artist who reads, writes and is committed to organize within different communities, including Performing Arts Forum in France. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política.

Kunsthalle Lissabon and Hangar Artistic Research Center are kindly supported by República Portuguesa / DGArtes. Kunsthalle Lissabon is supported by FfAI and Coleção Maria e Armando Cabral. Additional support for Sensing Salon is provided by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Canada Council for the Arts.