On 24th and 25th of August fluent is pleased to present Sensing Salon, a gathering conceived by Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira Da Silva and curated with Andrea Rodrigo at Centro Botín.

Sensing Salon is a studio practice that facilitates collaborative studying and experimenting with different practices and tools (such as tarot, reiki, astrology, Political and Fake Therapy, etc.)

Inspired by the poet Joan Retallack’s great line: ”poetics can take you only so far without an h”, Sensing Salon invokes multiple poetic and ethical techniques that assemble and form a composition to rehearse ways of sensing and making sense. Through this, it fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence.

The multiple assemblages through cards, stars, bodies, gestures, silences, sounds, and words produce an image of a question posed during the two-day study session, where participants are invited to share their practices, strategies, exercises and intuitions that will expand from and within the studio practice.

By means of a reading that decomposes and refigures a situation we will create together a study space that enables thinking about political and social issues in a way that also takes into account emotional, physical, sensual and intellectual [removed];In this, the four elements –air, fire, water, and earth– and the idea of correspondence give shape and constitute the lexicon and grammar at the core of these practices. This iteration of the Sensing Salon unfolds in the deep materiality of the architectures in which it occurs, embracing Centro Botín’s metal structure, its connection to water and the heat of this cold summer.

Through this it aims at exploring the spaces of multiplicity and resonance that open up when correspondence replaces linearity as the basis for thinking and existing.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher, writer, and filmmaker,  her academic and artistic works address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Divida Impagavel (2019), Unpayable Debt (2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013) Her artistic work includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman.

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13) and is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizers of Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política, she reads and writes.

Andrea Rodrigo is a researcher and curator in the field of dance and contemporary choreography that thinks about means of creating complicit experiences and producing knowledge and sensibilities. She is involved in contexts such as the Performing Arts Forum, St. Erme, France and Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao, where she worked as a coordinator from 2017-2018. She recently curated the programs What I am already intuiting in CA2M, Madrid, and Amarre in Conde Duque.