Studio Practice: On the Act of Reading Valentina Desideri

Dear reader,

You are invited to join us for Studio Practice: On the Act of Reading. The studio will be open from 2 to 8 pm on 2, 3 and 4 July 2015. You can stay for as much or as little time as you like.

Valentina, Denise, Jennifer, Cristina and Mara will gather in study and in the studio to take a close look at the act of reading.

Together we share several practices, among which are dance, healing practices (both fake and real), philosophy, astrology, writing and teaching. We consider each of these practices a kind of reading. But also, reading is going on all the time. We all constantly read text, images, situations, expressions, bodies and space, and a lot of our understanding is built upon these instantaneous readings.
Any reading is an imaging, already a composition and a representation of what is read. This view of reading as imaging draws on Walter Benjamin’s writings on reading and imaging as modes of expression that privilege intuition over a view of knowing and existing that relies on reflection, understanding and recognition.
We invite you to enter this study through a loose methodology we call Studio Practice, which refers to both the practice of being in the studio and the practice of studying.
If we consider study as something we do with others – modes of learning that produce other ways of living together, and vice versa – then the studio is not just
a place in which to study but also a place that makes study possible by virtue of its specific conditions.
The specific type of studio we are borrowing from is the dance studio, where multiple proposals, spoken or simply enacted, follow one another and travel through bodies and dimensions (physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual). In the studio we enter into sequences of actions, silences, discussions, attempts, banalities, conflicts, excitements. In other words: we engage in the specific mode of ‘ensembling’ that is study.
Assuming none of us knows what study might come
to mean to us, we invite you to join us in the studio,
to spend time reading, moving, talking, watching, listening, meeting, getting bored or interested or activated, gathering material around reading and following all possible lines of inquiry that might emerge.

Feel free to bring ‘things’ you would like to read; a book, a letter, an object, a movement, your hands…
We hope to see you there,

Valentina, Denise, Jennifer, Cristina and Mara

Studio Practice: On the Act of Reading is a three-day event organised by Valentina Desideri in collaboration with Denise Ferreira de Silva, Jennifer Lacey,
Cristina Rizzo and Mara Cassiani.

Studio Practice: On the Act of Reading takes place within and activates the exhibition Bassin ouvert by French designer and artist Clémence Seilles
(until 1 August 2015).

Co-produced by Bolzano Danza | Tanz Bozen.

Thanks to Museion for the participation of Cristina Rizzo.

Studio Practice: On the Act of Reading and Bassin ouvert are part of PIANO, Prepared Platform for Contemporary Art, France–Italy 2014–2016, initiated by d.c.a. \ French association for the development of centres d’art, in partnership with the Institut français in Italy, the French Embassy in Italy, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati.