Solo show gathering past work, the process of creation of the Echo Tarot deck, and a limited edition of the Echo Tarot deck

Reading with Echo is an experiment in collaborative creation, that Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva have been developing for the past five years.

Each and every reading, in their view, is informed by other readings that have taken place and also each and every reading is already (a possible, potential, or virtual) part of readings to come. This is because while Tarot readers may develop their own ways of reading a spread and interpreting a card, these will be already influenced by previous Tarot readings or what she or he may have read in a book or online.

Poethical Readings, the initial form of their collaboration, is oriented by the question of how to image ethics with/out the modern subject. The practice experiments with symbolic tools, including astrology, philosophy, palm reading, herbal healing, fake therapy, political therapy, Reiki, and the Tarot. Each session creates a space for a collective reading of an image, which captures the inseparability of the political and ethical dimensions of a personal, a collective, or global situation or question.

The Sensing Salon, the studio practice they have designed, expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Through formats that facilitate collaborative study and experiment with practices and tools for reading and healing, the Sensing Salon fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.

The Echo Tarot Deck embodies the very idea of reading that characterizes their practice, both Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon. This exhibition gathers the various moments of a five-year long process. The deck has been inspired by poethical readings of Ai Ogawa’s poems, in which we use Tarot spreads and Reiki sessions to assemble the meaning of each card as well as of the deck itself. It differs greatly from the traditional tarot decks, not so much in content but in terms of its ethical presuppositions. Instead of a linear trajectory of self-actualization (self-development) represented by The Magician, in the Echo deck, the Major Arcana combine into a complex composition while, in the Minor Arcana, instead of sequentiality (and its sense of development) the cards signal elementality (and its sense of implicancy). Overall the deck foregrounds materiality, as transformability, for it allows us to image the ethical, through the inseparability of the emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the corporeal.