The Sensing Salon: Reading the Berlin Conference’s Project of Extraction of Soil and Soul

As a contribution towards undoing the effects of the Berlin Conference, we invite you to gather on November 15th, 2025 at 6:52 pm CET to read its astrological chart. As the Sun returns to the exact same spot as when the conference first gathered on November 15, 1884, that is, as the Berlin Conference enters its 141st year, we will read three astrological charts, in order to identify its weak spots, and identify points of interventions that we can activate together today. 

We will first read the Berlin Conference Natal chart, which, while displaying the infinite possibilities of that moment, also gives neat indications for the kind of project that the conference inaugurated. Then we will read the chart of that moment, which happens to be the Berlin Conference Solar Return chart for this year, which describes how the project is currently unfolding. Finally we will read the synastry chart, which is a comparison of the Natal Chart and the Solar Return Chart, to find the project’s current “weak spots” and highlight three astrological configurations that serve as points of interventions. For each one, we propose an action or a practice to undo or undermine the effects of the Berlin Conference. 

Valentina Desideri explores artmaking as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is an artist and currently a researcher at the Centre for the Arts and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm) at the Royal Academy of the Arts & HDK-Valand in Sweden. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), a Master of Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a Bachelor of Arts in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London). She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy and is one of the co-organizers of the Performing Arts Forum in northern France. She has long-standing collaborations writing with Stefano Harney, developing Poethical Readings, the Sensing Salon and now Reading with Echo with Denise Ferreira da Silva, among many other collaborations.

Denise Ferreira da Silva works as an academic and an artist, who currently holds the position of Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities, at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, at New York University. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022), and La Deuda Impagable (2023) and co-editor of Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her artistic practice includes the films Serpent Rain (2026), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), Four Waters/Deep Implicancy (2022) and Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (2023) (w/ Arjuna Neuman) and the Poethical Readings, Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo (w/ Valentina Desideri).