On Sunday 27 September 2015, If I Can’t Dance convened an Open Reading Group led by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri in the Bijlmer, Amsterdam in preparation for the public launch of Edition VI – Event and Duration in January 2016.

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

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.”