Workshop with Valentina Desideri – ‘On the Wolf´s Trail’
July 7th, at 6 pm
Participation limited to 15 people
In English
Hangar – Centro de Investigação Artística
Registration via Form
Political Therapy is an artistic practice that borrows from the therapeutic set-up and that tries to address through touch any political problem that we may be facing or want to spend time with. Valentina Desideri practiced Political Therapy mostly as a one-to-one sessions since 2011, but in this session, she will experiment with some ways of doing it collectively. When working with groups that do not know each other, it has always been hard to agree on the formulation of a single question or problem that would feel urgent and pertinent to all, however, we may now be facing a different moment. As the mask of global racial capitalism falls and its violence intensifies, we may be able to gather and formulate a question that can engage us collectively, and help us staying with it, in touch.
Valentina Desideri 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 on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13), and now holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2023). 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 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.
“On the Wolf’s Trail” is a programme of sensory practices and lectures focused on decolonial ecology and restorative justice that explores pedagogical formats to debate forms of collective repair, restoration, resilience, and healing. Over four years, sessions will be led by practitioners from the fields of arts, environmental humanities, and post-colonial studies, and embrace topics such as mutualism and reciprocity, working towards the repair of ancestral relations.