Art of Connection - Fake Therapy & Political Therapy (queers & womxn)

“Therapy is not the re-conduction of the sick body to normality but of Being to what is possible to be.” – Franco Bifo Berardi

“Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but only medicine” –
J.M.G. Le Clèzio

Fake Therapy and Political Therapy are practices “between two persons that stimulate and reactivate the sometimes hidden capacities of anyone to heal anyone (or anything) else. [They are] autonomous of disciplinary origins and refuses expertise or any form of knowledge-authority” and have been invented and initiated by artist Valentina Desideri, who understands them as an open source that can be and is used by many practitioners in various contexts.

It started with the attempt “to get together to make 20 min one-to-one sessions in which one person would try to ‘heal’ the other, without knowing how. Every time the roles were reversed and the last ten minutes were dedicated to describe in the most detailed manner what the ‘therapists’ did.” After that she developed a deck of cards with instructions that were inspired by these descriptions and which can be modified in any way imaginable. The roles of therapist and patient are arbitrary and exchangeable.

‘Fake Therapy’ invites you to tackle problems on a personal level, while ‘Political Therapy’ deals with structural problems “and creates the conditions to develop other languages to talk about and do politics.”

No solution, no cure is intended. The sessions are “for those who do not need, nor want, to be fixed.” By playing with the therapeutic set-up we will rethink the concept of (self-)care and “celebrate the capacity of problems to unfold thoughts and images through touch and conversation.”