Political Therapy


Artwork

A work by Valentina Desideri



“Political Therapy” is a practice originally invented by Valentina Desideri, which she has spread to various public and private contexts over the past years, alongside with “Fake Therapy”. Both Political and Fake Therapy play with the therapeutic set-up and can be practiced and modified by anyone, anywhere. The roles of the therapist and patient are arbitrary and interchangeable, no cure is intended or guaranteed. On the contrary the therapies celebrate the capacity of problems to unfold thoughts and images through touch and conversation.


Valentina Desideri was best defined by a friend who called her a 20 year old on tour. Although this was meant as a reproach she found this definition more suiting than performance artist or anything like that. Lately she has also been called a psychic, which, if added to the previous description, makes of her a psychic 20 year old on tour. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London, she did a MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. 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 with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is part of the Oficina de Imaginação Política, she reads and writes.