Reading with Echo – A Seminar on the Psyche
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.
Between November 19th and 22nd, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri host ‘Reading with Echo – A Seminar on the Psyche’ at Shedhalle, combining practices developed by the artists from Echo seminars, Sensing Salons, and Poethical Readings. 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.
Seminar Sessions
Wednesday 19.11. 17-20.00
Friday 21.11. 17-20.00
Saturday 22.11. 13-16.00
Public Reading during Confluence II: Expanded forms of Knowledge – Reading with Echo
Saturday 22.11. 17-20.00
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.
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.
In Shedhalle, for the first time, we combine the Reading Tools and Echo Seminar:
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.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher, writer, and filmmaker, who currently holds the Samuel Rudin Chair Professor in Humanities in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and co-directs the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study co-Laboratory, at New York University. As an academic, her publications include Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota 2007), Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins, 2013), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg 2022) and A Divida Impagavel (Zahar, 2024). Her numerous articles have been published in venues such as Social Text, TCS-Theory, Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Quarterly, Cultural Dynamics, Social Identities, Theory & Event, Griffith Law Review, among others. She has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, La Trobe University, among others. In 2023, she held the International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the Universté de Paris 8. Her artwork includes the films 2016 Serpent Rain, 2018 4Waters-Deep Implicancy, and 2020 Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum, 2022 Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (with Arjuna Neuman) and the performance and visual art practices Poethical Readings, Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo (with Valentina Desideri). As a visual and performance artist, she has exhibited, performed, lectured, and/or contributed to publications at renowned international art spaces, including the Centre Pompidou, Whitechapel Gallery, MOMA, Guggenheim, Barbican Center, Serpentine Gallery, MASP, Galway Arts Centre, Glasgow Center for Contemporary Arts, Extracity Kunsthalle Antwerp, MACBA, Munch Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, and the São Paulo, Berlin, Urals, and Venice Biennials.
In 2021, Denise Ferreira da Silva presented Elemental Study Room at Shedhalle as part of Protozone2: Continuity/Transpassing – making histories together in more-than-human worlds, which also featured Valentina Desideri with a Poethical Reading. In 2023, Ferreira da Silva, together with Arjuna Neuman, showed the film Soot Breath within an installation of the same name during Protozone12: Syncretic Sites.
Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is an artist and researcher at the Centre for Arts and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm) at the Royal Institute of Arts/HDK-Valand in Sweden. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13), and later a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2019-2023) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Studies Co-Lab at NYU (2025-26). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizers of Performing Arts Forum, an artist-run space in the north of France. She collaborates with Stefano Harney with whom she co-authored two texts, and with Denise Ferreira da Silva, with whom she developed the practice of Poethical Readings (2015), the project The Sensing Salon (2016), and lately Reading With Echo (2024), all still ongoing. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org
