Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri: Sensing Salon

Drawing from each other's practices Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri will be working with The Showroom over a series of meetings and workshops researching different kinds of healing practices.

For two weeks they will set up a Sensing Salon, a studio for the practice of healing arts. The studio is designed to open a conversation about expanding existing ideas of art, to include the healing arts. It also creates a space where they can work together with London’s migrant communities, and include neglected traditional healing practices as well as rehearsing new ones.

Healing, as much as art, is a praxis. It is something to do. Even when you ask a physician about what’s really happening they can never answer, because they don’t know exactly, but there are thing that can be done - treatments, which in the case of modern medicine is very invasive – through which the body comes back to some kind of integration.

Through a holistic approach they will look at healing practices as an art form, a praxis that propose and rehearses its own ways of living and doing differently.

Working with local groups and residents the project will consist primarily in the creation of a space where those practices can be shared - such as Reiki, Tarot, Astrology - with residents of the Church Street Ward. At the same time, they hope the Sensing Salon will also encourage the residents to share their traditional complementary therapies of African, Arab, or South Asian origin.