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. Together they perform individual and group sessions of Poethical Readings where they use different reading tools, layering them to image and discus the question brought forward by the participants.
The Sensing Salon takes different shapes according to the context in which it takes place and it involves different guests and participants in each iteration.
Upcoming Events
Reading with Echo: A Seminar on the Psyche
Shedhalle Zurich
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. Between November 19th and 22nd, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri host ‘Reading with Echo—A Seminar on the Psyche’ at Shedhalle, Zurich,
Seminar Sessions
Wednesday 19.11. 5–8 pm / Shedhalle, Seestrasse 395, 8038 Zürich
Friday 21.11. 5–8 pm / Oskar R. Schlag, Geissbergweg 10, 8006 Zürich
Saturday 22.11. 1–4 pm / Shedhalle
Public Reading
Saturday 22.11. 5–8 pm / Shedhalle
Please register at mail@shedhalle.ch
The Sensing Salon
Reading the Berlin Conference’s Project of Extraction of Soil and Soul
DESACTA @ Savvy Contemporary
13.11.2025–11.01.2026
As a contribution towards undoing the effects of the Berlin Conference, we read three astrological charts, in order to identify its weak spots, as well as points of interventions that may be available to us today.
First, there is the Natal chart, which shows the position of the planets in the sky, as seen from Berlin, when the conference first gathered on November 15, 1884. While it displays the infinite possibilities of that moment, it also gives neat indications for the kind of project that the conference inaugurated.
Second, there is the Solar Return chart, which shows the position of the planets on the day of the conference’s “birthday” this year, on Nov 15, 2025. It describes how the project is currently unfolding, and when compared with the Berlin Conference natal chart, it gives clues to how to undermine its project.
Finally, third, there is the synastry chart, which is a comparison of the Natal Chart and the Solar Return Chart. There we find the project’s current “weak spots” and highlights 3 astrological configurations that serve as points of interventions. For each one, we propose an action or a practice to undo or halt the effects of the Berlin Conference.
