Denise Ferreira da Silva (born in 1963 in Brazil) is a philosopher and academic based in Vancouver. Her writing and artistic practice addresses the ethical questions of the global present and targets the metaphysical and onto-epistemological dimensions of modern thought. She is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), and Visiting Professor of Law, at Birkbeck University of London. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg 2022), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Reina Sofia (Madrid), The Belkin (Vancouver), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York) as well as 10th Berlin Biennial, Document14, 2022 Singapore Biennial. She has held Visiting Professorships at major universities, such as University of Pennsylvania, New York University, University of Toronto, Universidade de São Paulo, University of Copenhagen. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people. Currently, in Spring 2023, she is holding the International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8.
“Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself. We ask, could tenderness dissolve total violence? Could tears displace total extraction?”
Silva