Poethical Reading
DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA & VALENTINA DESIDERI
Tarot spread imaged on July the 5th, 2020, having as a background query "What the present moment is offering to life?”
“Would the poet’s intention emancipate the Category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place, which is also the Black Feminist Critic worksite? Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing? (...) Yes. From without the World, as we know it, where the Category of Blackness exists in/as thought – always already a referent of commodity, an object, and ‘the other,’ as ‘fact’ beyond ‘evidence’ – a Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing”.
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Black Feminist Poethics - The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World", 2014
“A poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you’re to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of art’s significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world. That as is not a simile; it’s an ethos. Hence the h. What I’m working on is quite explicitly a poethics of a complex realism.”
- Joan Retallack, Poethical Wager, 2004
What if, instead of providing a resolution, a direct answer, or a definite interpretation, a reading helped us to navigate the complexity of existence – attending to both its actual and virtual moments – its different positions, relationships and layers that also constitute us? Every reading exposes possibilities, reveals blockages, and shifts perspectives. Beyond the principles of non-contradiction and identity, readings design a space where multiple articulations of situations and events coexist without the imposition of a single meaning or direction.
Drawing from each other’s practices Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva come together for experimental readings. They experiment with ‘reading tools’ inspired by well-known and newly-designed practices – such as the Tarots, Political Therapy, Palmistry, Fake Therapy as well as Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy. Belonging to the kind of knowing Walter Benjamin calls intuitive faculty and Carl G Jung names creative thinking, these reading tools assemble images. Reading as imaging, in their practice, consists in an assembling that exposes and navigates the complex context constituting the situation, event, or problem that concerns a person or collective at a given moment and place. As such, it aims at expanding the horizon of interpretation, that is, to open up possibilities and unsettle realities.
For EhChO they will live-stream a Poethical Reading in which they will use the tool of Tarot to image this complex political moment in conversation with the viewers departing from the images provided by the reading.
The philosopher and visual artist Denise Ferreira da Silva, was born in Morro do Pasmado (Botafogo), grew up in Via Aliança (Bangu), Rio de Janeiro. Having lived and taught at universities in the United States, Australia, England, she currently lives and works in the territories of the Musqueam indigenous nation and is a Full Professor and Director of the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Photo: Alex Woodward @ Arika’s Episode 7
Valentina Desideri does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, is one of the co-organizers of the Performing Arts Forum in France, speculates with Stefano Harney, experiences Poetic Readings and Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva, is part of the Workshop on Political Imagination, she reads and writes.