Valentina Desideri
Artist Talk
Wednesday 18.12.2024/ 19.45

“I explore art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. I see study as something we do with others in specific arrangements: the way we seek modes of knowing that produce other possibilities of living together. I consider study an aesthetic and ethical practice: aesthetic for it experiments with sensibility and composition, and ethical insofar as it rehearses modes of living and knowing otherwise.
In this talk I would like to present a trajectory through some of the practices that compose my Studio Practice, from Fake Therapy, to Political Therapy to the Sensing Salon, focusing in particular on how those practices have shifted my attention from healing to sensing, from restoring health (as a goal) to sensing and making sense, feeling and thinking, at once (as an ongoing practice).”

BIO
Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is an artist, teacher and community organizer. She is a researcher at Centre for the Arts and the PoliticalImaginary at KKH/HDK-Valand in Sweden and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Critical Racial AntiColonial Studies Co-Lab at NYU. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum, an artist-run space in the north of France. She collaborates with Denise Ferreira da Silva, with whom she developed the practice of Poethical Readings (2015), The Sensing Salon (2016), and lately Reading With Echo (2024), all still ongoing.