On Sunday 27 September, If I Can’t Dance will convene an Open Reading Group led by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri in the Bijlmer, Amsterdam to acknowledge the end of summer and in preparation for the public launch of Edition VI in January 2016.

Starting from a reading of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Reading Art as Confrontation (2015), recently published as part of e-flux’s ‘Supercommunity’ and available here, Denise and Valentina will lead the group in a discussion around the text to formulate a political question from which a ‘poethical’ reading can be done. Across the day reading tools inspired by well-known and newly designed practices including astrology, poetry, tarot, philosophy, dance, reiki, and psychoanalysis, will be engaged with to expand the horizon of interpretation.

The Open Reading Group builds upon If I Can’t Dance’s established interest in reading as a practice, which is typified by our monthly reading group that has been convening for the past eight years, and which extends to sister reading groups in Toronto, New York and São Paulo. Within If I Can’t Dance, the reading group operates as a collective enquiry into the research field that circumscribe each of its two-year Editions. The Open Reading Group complements this by inviting an artist to lead a daylong session in a location around Amsterdam each Edition, and was inaugurated by the artist Alex Martinis Roe in Holysloot in August 2013 for Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication.

On this occasion, If I Can’t Dance’s Amsterdam Reading Group will be open to interested participants who can sign up to join us for a day of reading, workshop exercises and discussions. We will meet at our office on Westerdok 606-608 at 11am before cycling for about an hour to a location in the Bijlmer.

Sign up to receive a copy of the reading material and the program for the day by writing to bookings@ificantdance.org. Places are limited to 35 people, and lunch and refreshments will be provided.


About Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri

Valentina Desideri is an Amsterdam-based artist. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006) and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–2013). She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, she co-organises Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Prof. Stefano Harney, she writes biographies by reading people’s hands, and she engages in Poetical Readings with Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Notes Towards the End of Time (2015), and the co-editor, with Paula Chakravartty, of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). She is a member of the Living Commons Editorial Collective and a co-editor of Routledge’s book series Law and the Postcolonial and Indigenous Studies and the Law. Focusing on violence, her writings excavate the grounds of modern philosophy, science, law, state capital, and justice to expose the workings of raciality and coloniality in the global present. Her recent work also includes written and performed experiments on what she calls “black feminist poethics imaged as a radical ethical-political praxis towards the end of the world as we know it, that is, decolonization.”