The Echo-Deck

The Echo Tarot Deck embodies the very idea of reading that characterizes their practice, both Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon. 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.

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.twickeln können, diese jedoch bereits von früheren Tarot-Deutungen oder von dem, was sie in einem Buch oder online gelesen haben, beeinflusst sind.

Poethical Readings

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.

Sensing Salon

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.

In Shedhalle, for the first time, the Reading Tools and Echo Seminar are combined:

The Box

The box gathers texts, cards, tools, and other materials used for reading for questions, events, and situations. In the box there are different reading tools available for use. There are Tarot decks, Fake Therapy cards, books on Reiki and Tarot, as well as The Collected Poems of Ai, the book that inspired the Echo Tarot Deck, with instructions on how to read and practice.

The box is available for use during exhibition hours, anyone is welcome to do any kind of reading, practices or experiments. Feel free to bring your own books and tools.

Echo-Seminars

Throughout these almost ten years of practice, the Poethical Readings exposed how one or more of the components of what we call the emotional intrastructure of the subject—namely, fear, guilt, shame, and anger—are at play, behind every question and in the midst of every crisis. Towards gathering a sense of why and how this infrastructure has come to compose the psyche, which is the figuring of interiority assembled by psychoanalysis, we have organized this structured study program, which we call the Echo Seminars. Each major figure of psychoanalysis—Fred, Lacan, Jung, Klein—will be the object of a seminar series, which will be offered as a separate course or as modules of the same course. These will be in person meetings, which will follow the usual format of a seminar, that is, we will assign background readings to be discussed, but the main objective of the meetings is to share our research. This means that, in addition to our analysis of the theorist’s ideas, we will also discuss cases—that is, readings—in the seminar sessions.

18:00 Discussion round (further information to follow)

19:30 Dinner

20:30 Film screening

Saturday 22.11. 4–9 pm / Shedhalle

We will be accompanied by Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose work Reading with Echo is featured in the exhibition. The two artists are hosting a seminar of the same name this week and share their practice on saturday in the afternoon through a public reading, together with Lucie Tuma.

Reading with Echo is an experiment in collaborative creation that Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva have been developing for the past six years. It has three components: the Reading Tools, the Study Group, and the Echo Seminars. In this collaborative experiment, Tarot, Reiki, and symbolic tools are converged to explore the inseparability of the political, ethical, and emotional dimensions of existence. Using these tools, they question and undo intra-structural, underlying assumptions of the psyche. While doing so, they listen to the archives of Shedhalle in order to find answers in this contemporary moment of violent political backlashes, asking how things could have turned out otherwise.

Program Confluence II: Expanded Forms of Knowledge – Reading with Echo

4pm

Tour with Carla Peca

5pm

Sharing of reading practices “Reading with Echo” with Denise Ferreira da Silva, Valentina Desideri and Lucie Tuma

7pm

Meal

16:00 Tour of the exhibition

17:00 Reading with Echo – with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, moderated by Lucie Tuma

19:00 Soup

18:00 Welcome

18:30 Discussion with Carla Peca, Lucie Tuma, Michael Hiltbrunner.

Moderation: Shedhalle Staff

19:30 Meal

18:00 Exhibition tour with Renate Cornu (curator of the first exhibition in the Shedhalle 1985)

19:00 Dinner

20:00 Listening Performance: Blablabor (Zurich)

21:00 Concert: MELO (Zurich)

13:30 Tour of the exhibition

14:30 Activation with Valentina Desideri on the exhibition contribution “Reading with Echo”

16:00 Discussion on archiving as resilient practice and care with Elke aus dem Moore, Shruti Belliappa, Mo Diener, Stefan Länzlinger, and others. In collaboration with the Swiss Social Archives Zurich

17:30 Karaoke readings by Paloma Ayala (with texts by Gloria Anzaldúa)

18:30 Dinner

20:00 Activation with Shruti Belliappa on the exhibition contribution “Marginalia”

18:30 Welcome

19:00 Performance: Nils Amadeus Lange (Zurich)

20:00 Concert: Citron Citron (Geneva)

14:00 Tour of the exhibition

15:00 Skills sharing workshop on archives as resilient practice and care (more information to follow)

17:00 Discussion round (more information to follow)

18:30 Dinner

On the last weekend of the ProtoZones, ProtoZone20: Unending invites you for an (un)ending goodbye. The Shedhalle team hosts this weekend starting from Saturday evening until Sunday evening.

On Saturday we invite you to a communal dinner. Food and communal eating have been key elements of our gatherings at Shedhalle. So for the last time for now, we will gather on a long table in the middle of the room. There is also a possibility to contribute and give something back: it’s a potluck! We invite you, the invited, to bring a dish and share it with everyone.

Then, we start an all-night-long goodbye party, celebrating the ProtoZone 2020-2025 program and welcoming what is coming next: The anniversary group show Loving Shedhalle – Abundance end of October this year and the new directorship of Shedhalle in January 2026.

Sunday morning we host a brunch for those who didn’t manage to come before on that weekend.

After the long brunch we end with an unending conversation about the ProtoZone and the exhibition format between Lucie Tuma, Michelangelo Miccolis, Thea Reifler, Phila Bergmann and Vanessa Bosch. The conversation is moderated by Prof. Ann Mbuti who accompanied the ProtoZones from the very beginning.

Group Show

Loving Shedhalle—Abundance brings together a total of fifteen artistic positions whose concerns are particularly relevant to the last forty years of Shedhalle. The exhibition activates Shedhalle’s archives and draws on numerous conversations with people who have worked here. The invited works and artistic practices reinforce each other and form connections without diluting themselves. Relating their concerns to each other in a sensual and material way means keeping an eye on a multitude. With exuberant joy, Loving Shedhalle—Abundance celebrates not only the archival holdings, but also the very existence of Shedhalle itself.

With Paloma Ayala, Sabian Baumann, Ursula Biemann, Blablabor, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Donna Conlon, Shruti Belliappa and Kiran Kumār, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri, Sylvie Fleury, Barbara Heé, Lang/Baumann, knowbotiq, Pipilotti Rist, Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv (RJSaK) Archive, Susanne Sauter.

Events during the exhibition will be announced by Shedhalle and on loving.shedhalle.ch.

Opening: Friday, 24 October, 6 p.m.

Duration: 25 October 2025 to 11 January 2026

Publication

The book Loving Shedhalle—Resonance provides insight into the research processes that informed Loving Shedhalle. The approach to the history of Shedhalle is driven by a desire to listen to the material traces and voices of past decades and to resonate with them. Resonance here means more than echo: it describes the relationship between bodies that vibrate in response to each other through encounter. The book searches for the spaces in between. It listens to forms of knowledge that are passed on in relationships and through embodiment.

With contributions by AKW, Sønke Gau, Frederikke Hansen, Michael Hiltbrunner, Gülsün Karamustafa, Renate Lorenz, Maurice Maggi, Carla Peca, Katharina Schlieben, Nora Sternfeld, Lucie Tuma; and interviews with Sabian Baumann, Felix Brunner, Sylvia Kafehsy, Elke aus dem Moore, Katharina Morawek, and Marion von Osten.

Book launch: Thursday, 20 November, 6 p.m., Shedhalle Zurich

Bilingual edition: German and English
Publisher: Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich.

Website 

The web platform loving.shedhalle.ch offers direct access to videos, photographs and documents from the various eras and exhibitions of Shedhalle. Shedhalle archive has been made accessible by the Swiss Social Archives since 2022. Videos and photographs have been digitised in collaboration with Memoriav, and posters and documents from Shedhalle can also be viewed as part of the project. The online archive aims to document the eras, exhibitions, people and concerns of Shedhalle. To this end, contextualising oral history interviews are being conducted.

https://loving.shedhalle.ch

Bilingual website: German and English

Programming: Furbo, Zurich.

more information about Confluences and other events soon.

CONFLUENCES gather practices, archival fragments and people linked to the Shedhalle. During conversations, meals, performances, listening sessions, discussions and workshops, works of the exhibition and the archives get activated. Confluences (re)visit concerns and questions that repeatedly appeared in different time periods at Shedhalle.

Confluence describes an “estuary”: both end and new beginning. This cyclical quality shapes the encounters, tracing resonances in divergent strategies across time and generating collective knowledges.