Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene

Abstract

In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularcentric strategies, such as spectacular large-scale artworks and data visualizations, questioning the epistemological assumptions underpinning them. The author proposes Tarot, a dialogical practice unfolding through a deck of cards, often used for divination or occult purposes, as a valuable method for addressing the cognitive and affective messiness of climate crisis. This article examines three socially engaged art practices centring Tarot – James Leonard’s The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies (2017–), Adelita Husni-Bey’s The Reading/La Seduta (2017) and Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri’s poethical readings (2015–). These case studies advance an understanding of Tarot as affective cartography, foregrounding the embodied and interpretive labour of negotiating connections across different crises and contradictions. Tarot provides a social context to experiment with new possibilities, unsettling ‘rational’ habits of thought and rethinking the practice of ‘making sense’ in the uneven Anthropocene.

In December 2019, bushfires were sweeping the southern and eastern states of Australia. Thick smoke began to cloak Sydney and other major cities. Ash washed into the ocean and tinged the beaches black. It was the summer when everyone downloaded the FiresNearMe app to monitor the Rural Fire Service updates on the spread and status of fires. We watched as the colour-coded alert levels swung from ‘under control’ blue to ‘out of control’ red. Small, diamond-shaped icons speckled the coastline and began spotting inland. On the first weekend of 2020, a fire broke out close to my family’s farm in New South Wales. My father and brother were building firebreaks to defend the land from the encroaching blaze. Meanwhile, I was in a deserted shared office in Sydney, thinking and writing about how to visualize the uneven impact of environmental crisis. On this afternoon, checking the app became a constant obsession. I watched the progress of the fire until it swept across a highway and swallowed the farm. I didn’t know what to do then. The app felt crucial and addictive and then pointless. It felt like a vital piece of knowledge and then a meagre abstraction of a situation of which I had no real sense. I started to pray, to plead, to pace around the room. I felt the sudden urge to take out my Tarot deck and ask for guidance, to spread out a random selection of cards and methodically untangle my scrambled thoughts. I have been reflecting on the differences between FiresNearMe and Tarot, and how I was flitting between them during this time. I am interested in Tarot as a cartographic method for understanding how personal experiences are inscribed with a large web of complex and changeable factors. This led me to investigate the curious adaptation of Tarot in recent socially engaged art practices responding to the threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why are artists turning to Tarot, and the spiritual in general, as a site of political activation?

Tarot is a practice that unfolds through a deck of playing cards, used for entertainment or divination. It is an old practice, dating back to the Italian Renaissance. However, Tarot only acquired its more recognizable esoteric and occultist dimensions in the 18th and 19th centuries, linking to Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism (Farley, 2009: 96; Pollack, 2019: 5). ¹ Today, there is a proliferation of decks and endless interpretations. Some of the most influential decks, such as the Rider-Waite, feature cards populated with feudal archetypes, astrological signs, natural elements, and gods and goddesses. In a traditional Tarot reading, the querent (or questioner) comes to the reader with a problem for which they are seeking guidance. The reader lays out a spread and decodes the cards, tailoring the reading to the querent’s mindset, charting a path through the problem. ² A skilful reader is adept at recognizing patterns and attuning their intuition to animate the cards. In this sense, a Tarot reading can be described as a practice of storytelling. The cards themselves are fragments from larger narratives that are mixed into something new and specific to the problem guiding the reading. To this end, the meanings of the cards are not static but must be developed and configured. As a form of knowledge production, Tarot invites emotional, affective and heuristic responses, meaning one might become unsettled in the process of a reading. For this reason, Tarot can generate intimate and vulnerable experiences; it is pedagogical and therapeutic. Over the past few years, I have begun incorporating Tarot into my teaching practice. Each Tarot card offers something: an image, a provocation, a warning, an idea, which, in combination, opens a space for interpretation and negotiation. It is this creative and collective potential to which I am drawn. The symbolic language of the Tarot offers a way to recast the problem, to step back from conventional methods of problem-solving or well-worn vocabularies that produce familiar ruts and dead ends.

The arcane and allegorical nature of Tarot cards is seemingly at odds with dominant aesthetic strategies of visualizing environmental crisis. As global warming intensifies and the world staggers closer to the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, there are countless examples of art, films, documentaries, graphs, data visualizations and social media campaigns premised on a knowledge deficit model of communication. The assumption that a lack of knowledge about climate change is the central reason for inaction is a persistent belief in the sciences (Seethaler et al., 2019; Simis et al., 2016). At worst, the deficit model assumes facts are self-supporting and adequate for emotional and intellectual transformation, constructing viewers as the passive recipients of knowledge. But what if this logic is cultivating an overreliance on certain representations of crisis that limit rather than expand our understanding of climate change? Rather than providing the groundwork for lasting, meaningful transformation, what if these forms of information overwhelm and paralyse us?

Tarot contributes something that is lacking from our current responses, that is, a social context for sorting and processing information. This is to create space for the vital connective work that needs to happen across disparate crises. Anthropogenic climate change is unfolding on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. Moreover, there are no fluid transitions between scales; think of the jolt from Google Earth to Google Street View. I want to offer Tarot reading as a method for working through these problems of scale. A Tarot spread is a modular configuration, where each card corresponds to a specific location in space and time. It converses across different scales while retaining firm anchors in the present. At the same time, the humble Tarot card is a valuable antidote to an information culture that privileges disembodied visual consumption, that is, the ceaseless and voracious desire to see more. Tarot is helpful for rethinking what it means to see with and alongside the other senses. It is a language that is amenable to the shifting scales and dislocations of an era hovering on the brink of extinction.

This article will unfold in two main parts. In the first section, I consider the challenges of visualizing environmental crisis. I review two dominant artistic strategies – large-scale artworks and information visualization – and question the pedagogical and epistemological assumptions underpinning them. This culminates in a critique of the installation Exit (2008–2015), an interdisciplinary collaboration between Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin. In the second section, I trace the role of Tarot in art and popular culture, and examine its significance. The artists I focus on in this article are working in the field of socially engaged art: a style of contemporary art practice where the medium of the artwork is social interaction and exchange. Because much of what constitutes a Tarot reading is its embodied and dialogical qualities, socially engaged art is a fitting context for animating the practice in its fullest sense. Over the last two decades, art theorists, curators and critics have contributed to a critical discussion about the evolving character of socially engaged art, including the reciprocal movement between art and activism (Bishop, 2012; Jackson, 2011; Kester, 2004; Sholette, 2017; Thompson, 2015). I analyse three examples of artistic practice centring Tarot: James Leonard’s project, The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies (2016–), a small travelling tent in which the artist offers ‘climate change divination readings’ to members of the public; Adelita Husni-Bey’s The Reading/La Seduta (2017), featuring a Tarot reading with a small group of US teenagers on extractive capitalism; and Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri’s ‘poethical readings’ (2015–), mobilizing Tarot, astrology, palmistry and reiki as alternative political tools. In these practices, I argue that Tarot is a valuable cartographic method for ‘making sense’ of the cognitive and affective messiness of climate crisis, distributed across multiple different scales. I offer these three examples because each one uses Tarot not just to reconfigure the senses but also to develop an aesthetic praxis for how to live better in precarious times.

Seeing, knowing, acting: strategies for visualizing environmental crisis

Over the past few years, I have taught an undergraduate art theory course at the University of New South Wales called Art and the Anthropocene. My students and I examine several themes and issues springing from the ecological and socio-cultural epoch known as the Anthropocene, a term we discuss and problematize on account of its implied anthropocentricism and claims to universalism. In the first tutorial, I conduct an icebreaker exercise asking students to write down the first word or feeling that comes to mind with the phrase ‘climate crisis’. I then cluster the words into three (sometimes more) categories: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Representation’ and ‘Emotions’. In 2021, some of the most common words in the ‘Knowledge’ category include: ‘truth, storytelling, misinformation, urgency, neglect, media-driven, dramatic’. The students spoke of a dissatisfaction with the sensationalist tone and ideological deceit underpinning media coverage of climate issues. In ‘Representation’ – ‘scale, impending doom, tangible, intangible, apocalyptic, inaccessible, colossal, objectification, the unknown’. This list indicates how climate crisis is something that more often fails to translate into stable aesthetic representations with clear boundaries. In ‘Emotions’ – ‘disillusionment, powerless, surrender, inertia, hope, hopelessness, loneliness, apathy, frustration, overwhelming’. And these, mostly negative, words compose a striking portrait of the individualism and atomization inflecting student experiences of climate crisis. As a class, we experiment with drawing connections and relationships between the three categories. We then begin to think about how we might rewire the relationship between what we see, what we know and our capacity to act. The goal is not to arrive at a more optimistic or hopeful outlook but to cultivate generative new ways of thinking and forging relationships to the world and each other.

Anthropogenic climate change is reshaping everything from the planetary to the microscopic. It confounds our ability to intellectually grasp what is unfolding, let alone visually represent it. Philosopher Timothy Morton offers the idea of ‘hyperobjects’ as ‘things that are massively distributed in space and time relative to humans’ (Morton, 2013: 1). This is a useful contribution for apprehending the scalar and representational problem: anthropogenic climate change cannot be reduced to a local manifestation of ‘weather’ and spreads across multiple, incommensurable scales. These objects are real but cannot be directly seen in their entirety. Morton outlines several features that characterize hyperobjects, including their inescapable stickiness, their viscosity. Take Australia’s Black Summer bushfires as an example and the thickness of the smoke, settling on our skin. It is impossible to separate and feel individual smoke particles entering the lungs. Hyperobjects come close and then recede; it is difficult to determine where they begin and end. We experience them as visceral and elusive, glimpsing only their partial and localized effects. Hyperobjects stretch across time, even deep time, phasing in and out of human consciousness. Thinking in this way requires understanding there is no escape from the envelopment of hyperobjects. Climate breakdown is better conceived as an assemblage of things moving at different speeds and on different scales, rather than a thing itself. As Mark Bould (2021: 26) writes, it ‘exceeds our framings of the world, and presses chaos, complexity and non-linearity upon us’. The paradox is that we are seeing both too much and not enough. In visual art, this is part of an ongoing negotiation between our theories and practices of representation and the material realities of accelerating environmental decline (Campos Johnson, 2020: 58).

There is a prevalent instinct to ‘go big’ in art and visual culture when it comes to representing climate change, prompting large-scale, spectacular and ‘immersive’ exhibitions, often fixating on monumental icons of global warming. Consider artist Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014–2015), featuring enormous chunks of glacial ice installed in the centre of Copenhagen to mark the UN IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change, or photographer Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale aerial images of ravaged landscapes. In 2016, Burtynsky began The Anthropocene Project, an encyclopaedic undertaking documenting ‘the biggest examples’ of industrial and extractive infrastructures. These artistic responses are understandable given the challenge of hyperobjects and the alarming, near-incomprehensible scale of environmental destruction. However, I want to ask: how can art do more than ask viewers to witness catastrophic scenes in awestruck horror? Susan Ballard (2021: 7) questions whether it is enough for artworks to simply describe: ‘artworks are expected to symbolically stand in for elsewhere trauma or be read like the newspaper’. The dispassionate manner in which one might read a newspaper calls to mind Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2014) identification of Anthropocene (an)aesthetics. He examines the aesthetics of the Anthropocene as an ‘unintended supplement to imperial aesthetics’ (p. 220). The naturalization and beautification of industrial pollution in canonical Western artworks, such as Claude Monet’s Impression: Sun Rising (1873), leads to a partial loss of feeling and perception. The Anthropocene anaesthetic, then, works like a sedative, desensitizing the viewer to actual physical conditions. Demos (2017) takes this idea further, suggesting Burtynsky’s mesmerizing photographs induce a perverse form of aesthetic pleasure. The aerial gaze of the camera perpetuates a ‘technological, and even geological, mastery devoid of environmental ethics’ (pp. 63–64). According to Demos, these spellbinding scenes of devastation numb the viewer into complacency while obscuring the manifold acts of violence unfolding on the ground.

Another dominant method of representing the impact of anthropogenic climate change is information visualization, embracing computational modelling, graphics and simulations to communicate changes extending far outside the realm of human perception. Data visualization within popular environmentalism aims to give a captivating shape and narrative to large volumes of information, illustrating patterns and causal relationships that emerge slowly over time. This is a reminder that apprehending the Anthropocene is an exercise in cumulative thinking. An overreliance on positivist epistemologies, however, risks crowding out or making subservient other epistemologies, encoding Western scientific objectivity as uniquely capable of truth telling. A narrow approach to communicating the ‘facts’ of climate change can fail to register the slippery and ephemeral aspects of what it means to live with and through climate crisis. Heather Houser (2014) considers the rise of data and information visualization, coining the shorthand ‘infovis’ to describe the online proliferation of succinct graphs, charts and diagrams. She argues infovis can function as a techno-fix for environmental engagement, falsely envisioning a smooth passage from data to mind to action. This fits into a larger raft of environmental discourses platforming ‘solutions’ that eschew a confrontation with the existing structures of neoliberal capitalism, effectively preserving the root causes of a given crisis. For Houser, such assumptions ‘disregard not only the question of precisely how environmental art activates audiences but also the messy milieu of uncertainty and doubt in which it circulates’ (p. 333). It is therefore vital to consider the contexts in which information circulates and the potential for feelings of emotional inundation and paralysis (or ‘infowhelm’, to use Houser’s 2020:1 term), where one is confronted with an abundance of information to navigate and process. This requires a counterbalancing of the overstated belief in the power of data to accomplish the task of educating the viewer and spurring them into action.

These two major aesthetic tendencies collide in Exit, a large-scale installation and data visualization commissioned by Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. I first saw Exit at UNSW Galleries in Sydney in 2017, almost 10 years after it was exhibited as part of the influential exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject in 2008. The installation format is a curved room with a panoramic screen. The viewer enters a dark, cinematic space and stands or sits on the floor; the lack of formal seating is a recurrent aspect of the installation design. The central feature of Exit is a floor-to-ceiling sized earth orbiting around the room. With each rotation, the earth rumbles into view and acts as a screen wipe, removing or revealing statistical information about one of six issues pertaining to the overarching theme of global migration: the impact of rising sea levels, the increasing movement of people into dense urban areas and the destruction of ecosystems threatening the survival of Indigenous languages. Exit is based on the ideas of philosopher Paul Virilio, best known for his work on technology, speed and time. In the catalogue for Native Land, Stop Eject (Virilio et al., 2008: 7), Virilio himself warns of a massive intensification of global migration due to the displacements of climate crisis – up to a billion people before 2050. For Virilio, this represents a form of ‘repulsive’ globalization, where the operational logic is one of expulsion and perpetual movement. In each of the six chapters of Exit, the faint outline of a world map is visible against a black background while glowing lines begin to stretch and curve across it. Pixels flow to and from miniature national flags and across borders, luminous spheres shrink and expand, disassembling and recomposing the map. The soundscape consists of a continuous industrial drone and a mechanical staccato punching out numerical values over and over, almost like a Geiger counter. It is also punctuated with distinct sonic cues to complement each chapter, such as crackling wildfires, the gulping of water and the inaudible chatter of multiple people speaking.

According to Elizabeth Diller (see Diller and Scofidio, 2015), a co-creator of Exit, ‘we wanted to tell the story without passion, through facts. If we could just let the data do the talking, it could possibly produce an effect, a strong emotional effect.’ I want to problematize this kind of dispassionate approach and the belief in the unmediated power of data to ‘do the talking’. Here it is useful to recall Donna Haraway’s (1988: 581) famous critique of the ‘god trick’ as the ‘view from nowhere’. She argues instead for a grounded and ethical practice of situated knowledges, accountable to specific material conditions. Indebted to Haraway, feminist philosopher Loraine Code (2006: 23) also offers ‘negotiated empiricism’ as an approach that ‘takes empirical evidence seriously while contending that evidence rarely speaks for itself either in its claims to count as evidence, or in its meanings and implications’. The creators of Exit admit ‘no dataset is neutral’ (Virilio et al., 2008: 125) and acknowledge that some collected datasets are approximate and incomplete. But the datasets are stitched together in a seamless fashion; there are no visual gaps or ruptures in the smooth flow of numbers rising and falling. How might this work appear if the creators chose to represent uncertainties and fragmentariness? What if there was a more self-reflexive approach regarding interpretative choices? This line of thinking matters because it might afford Exit with a productive pedagogical opening, giving viewers more agency to engage with the politics of knowledge production. The totalizing aesthetic environment of Exit mutes and isolates viewers as they sit on the floor, gazing up at the visualization. It is a good example of what Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire (1970: 53) describes as the ‘banking model’ of education, where the student is seen as a passive receptacle to be filled with the gift of knowledge, anaesthetizing critical consciousness. This is not unlike Mirzoeff’s diagnosis of the Anthropocene anaesthetic.

Architecture scholar and co-creator Laura Kurgan claims much of her work revolves around ‘raising political awareness with data’ but insists Exit ‘shouldn’t tell you what to do . . . that’s why it’s art, that’s why it’s not advocacy’ (Kurgan, 2015). This suggests a fear of producing art that might be labelled propaganda or didacticism. But the firm separation between ‘art’ and ‘advocacy’ works to seal off art from tangible political applications. This comment glosses over a rich tradition of artmaking full of tactical incursions into other spheres of life, such as (but not limited to) socially engaged art. Further, I want to argue the common refrain of ‘raising awareness’ is no longer an adequate goal when it comes to the relationship between art and anthropogenic climate change. I take inspiration from Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s (2018) critique of two dominant theories of change: raising awareness and documenting damage. The latter is reliant on documenting and circulating evidence of damage which, she argues, can reproduce the damage inflicted upon Indigenous communities. Raising awareness is often couched in a deficit model of communication. The auto-pedagogical design of Exit supposes viewers will know what to do with the information they are presented with. What is often ill-defined is the critical mass of people that must be made aware to then make a difference. This can subsequently defer action and disempower those whose knowing is deemed insufficient. This means the horizon of actionable awareness is in constant recession. Tuck offers a compelling counterargument: ‘what if we did not wait for others to know but are inspired by our own knowing? What if we hold true that we are the ones who need to know and not others?’ She therefore advocates for more enabling theories of change, taking one’s own knowing as the basis for action. So, to consider Tuck’s point in relation to the escalating threat of climate crisis, there is no time to wait. What does it mean to translate one’s own knowing into a course of action?

One of the major problems associated with these dominant methods of environmental artmaking is the failure to recognize what art can be and do in the context of climate crisis. Again, Ballard (2021) describes how art is often underestimated, referring to exhibitions showcasing slabs of coal and melting ice to ‘confront’ the viewer. In these scenarios, she argues, ‘art was not let out of the box, but told to be obedient’ (p. 7). An aesthetic servitude to ‘the facts’ blocks the capacity of art to produce knowledge about what it means to live on a warming planet. Natalie Loveless (2019) expounds the unique possibilities for claiming art as research and making socially engaged art in the context of the Anthropocene. She advocates ‘modes of temporal and material attunement . . . that require slowing down in a way that does not fetishize the slow but in which slowness comes from the work of defamiliarization and the time it takes to ask questions differently’. This can open the door to a more expansive artistic practice that is less concerned with treating global warming as an object to be visualized ad infinitum. In other words, this means pivoting from art in an illustrative mode to art as a mode of inquiry. Ballard and Loveless are helpful in fleshing out an aesthetic and pedagogical praxis oriented to the work of survival. Art can be the shaping of tools and infrastructures for resistance and adaptation on a damaged planet. In this vein, I am attentive to the need for critical cartographies to navigate the complex and shifting conditions of the present (Braidotti, 2019). This is to hold open space for the vital connective work that needs to happen across different crises and contradictions. But it is also about opening spaces to breathe and move, weaving stories, knowledges and emotions into arrangements that forge new connections and possibilities, disrupting the reproduction of the world as it is.

To be fair, one could argue that Exit is a cartographic exercise: visualizing multiple connections to create a fuller picture of global migration patterns now and into the future. The distinction I wish to make with Tarot is that it relies on embodied, interpretative and collective labour to animate connections. This is what separates the intellectual and emotional work of Tarot from the easy consumption of Exit. In the practices I focus on, Tarot is used to challenge habits of thought and classification. It is as much about slowing down and rethinking how we make connections as the connections themselves. Let’s return to the icebreaker exercise with which I began this section. As a group, after brainstorming responses to the words ‘climate crisis’, we were left with a loose web of feelings and impressions. I invited the students to re-categorize the words, to consider, for example, whether ‘tangible’ could be placed under ‘Knowledge’ rather than ‘Representation’ and to therefore disrupt the normative co-ordinates of understanding climate crisis. In doing so, the goal is to divert from ocularcentric responses and the numbing anaesthetic, cultivating in its place a more holistic aesthetics, which, in Greek, means to perceive by the senses of the mind, and to feel (Demos et al., 2021: 149). Climate educator Blanche Verlie (2021) distinguishes between emotions, which are familiar and identifiable, and affects, which are ‘distributed enigmatic intensities that might be perplexing, fleeting or disorienting, and they often exceed our capacity to make sense of them’ (p. 24). So, I approach Tarot as a cartographic practice that accommodates affective intensities and locations. Tarot intervenes in the idea of ‘making sense’, unpicking a scientific or ‘common sense’ logic in order to experiment with new patterns. But it is also a method of attuning the senses, inviting affective, heuristic and intuitive responses to the cards.

Reading the cards: Tarot and socially engaged art

In contrast to the stunning realism of spectacular photographs or ‘immersive’ data-driven installations, Tarot cards represent a humble alternative. James Leonard, Adelita Husni-Bey and Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva each use Tarot in the loose context of socially engaged art. In this field, artists tend to prioritize a collaborative and open-ended process over a finite product, attempting to erode the traditional hierarchies between artist, artwork and audience (Bishop, 2012: 2). Tarot, on the other hand, rubs shoulders with the arcane realm of magic. This a porous and imperfect term to describe a vast range of disparate practices that invoke spiritual realms. But there is no stable, transhistorical definition of magic, nor do magical practitioners fall into a shared political orientation. The central ingredients of Tarot and socially engaged art are talking and spending time together. Grant Kester (2004: 8) theorizes the subgenre of ‘dialogic art’ to describe instances where ‘conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself’. This also inscribes the durational qualities of the artwork – there is a cumulative process of dialogic exchange involving the artist and participants rather than a singular flash of insight. So, both artist and Tarot reader are invested in the slow and embodied co-creation of a narrative. There is even something conspiratorial about this, looking to unpick a scientific or ‘common sense’ logic in order to glimpse some new pattern or shape. It is a process of testing the boundaries of what constitutes authoritative knowledge and what kinds of knowledges can emerge under which conditions.

On the surface, it appears there has been a recent resurgence of Tarot and oracle decks in popular culture. Over the last five years, media outlets such as The Atlantic (Beck, 2018), The New Yorker (Smallwood, 2019) and The Washington Post (Pulliam Bailey, 2021) have documented the improbable rise of Tarot on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. In the art world, Jamie Sutcliffe (2021: 17) broaches the so-called rediscovering of the relationship between art and magic, noting with frustration contemporary art’s amnesiac relationship with the occult. To be clear, such practices are not ‘new’ but have tended to wax and wane over time, becoming visible at certain junctures and receding into cloistered subcultures. Sutcliffe argues that a superficial narrative of ‘re-enchantment’ neglects adequate recognition of the cultures that sustain the occult and have done so for a long time. In fact, Jason Ananda Josephson-Storm (2017) argues the popular narrative of disenchantment, that is, the idea that belief in magic and spirits has been replaced with the rise of modernism and instrumental reason is a myth. In other words, ‘we have never been disenchanted’ (p. 3). So, it is true that magical or spiritual practices, such as Tarot, have always been present. It is also true these practices are undergoing a revitalization of sorts. In this article, I want to suggest the increasing prospect of societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change is, in part, fuelling a hunger for new/old tools and knowledges that can speak to profound feelings of emotional destabilization and the confounding, existential forces that elude representation. This is the shortfall of ‘rational’ knowledge-making systems. On another level, to imagine such practices invoking the spiritual forces for social and ecological renewal is, perhaps, a pale imitation of what Indigenous communities have known for centuries, who have experienced societal collapse due to genocidal colonialism. I am reminded, for instance, of Métis scholar Zoe Todd’s (2016) reflections on philosopher Bruno Latour’s (2013) lecture on ‘Natural Religion’ with striking and underacknowledged similarities to Inuit cosmopolitical thought. This, she argues, is symptomatic of a larger, structural ignorance of Indigenous scholars whose work precedes Western philosophical thought on topics such as ‘the more-than-human’ (p. 7).

In saying this, I do not want to conflate the heterogenous terrain of magical and spiritual practices with Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies – this would be a crude simplification. There are points of tension and connection to be explored but this is part of a larger conversation. To delve deeper into Tarot, there are vestiges of Eurocentrism in some of the best-known decks, such as Aleister Crowley’s Thoth and AE Waite and Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite, both of which are affiliated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British magical order active from 1887 to 1903. In these older decks, the illustrations on the cards tend to be quite anthropocentric with their feudal archetypes. However, there is a risk of being too literal and prescriptive when interpreting the Tarot. The point is these are archetypes that are open enough to translate across various cultural contexts. The cards are vessels for timeless problems, such as dealing with grief, the pursuit of meaningful work, or the danger of illusions, all of which can be twisted and turned depending on the context. Newer decks dismantle and reimagine the classical Tarot archetypes, infusing them with more diverse representation, such as Cristy C Road’s queer-activist Next World Tarot (2020) or Kim Krans’s The Wild Unknown (2016), which eschews human figures altogether. These are just two of a long list of Tarot decks, modified and updated to speak to different identities, traditions and concerns. So, Tarot is far too diffuse, too promiscuous, to pin down into a rigid ideological position. In this context, I am less interested in Tarot as a soothing balm for troubling times, which can be too easily packaged into individualist and privatized experiences. Instead, Tarot can be a productively unsettling force, working to denaturalize ‘rational’ (instrumentalist, extractivist) systems of value. Unlike the stultifying effects of sublime devastation and infowhelm, Tarot asks for an investment of time and attention in the process of building and negotiating connections. In this sense, it is not just about divination but crafting cartographies for the present. It can function as a social infrastructure for working out how to live and what to do next.

Let’s now turn to James Leonard’s The Tent of Casually Observed Phenology, which he describes as a ‘performance installation’, beginning in 2015. I start with Leonard because, of the three artistic practices I focus on here, his work most emulates a traditional one-on-one Tarot reading. The project began as part of an artist residency Leonard undertook at the Boston Centre of the Arts in early 2015, which aimed to foster the development of socially engaged art projects. Over two and a half years, Leonard gave over 700 readings on climate change, travelling with his tent around the northeastern states of the US. The tent itself is a small white dome, set up in numerous places, often adjacent to or within hosting institutions, such as universities, galleries and spiritual centres. The slightly ruffled exterior is pinned with paintings of various creatures, deer, birds, butterflies, on frayed white squares of muslin cloth. Phenology is an old and under-recognized science, closely related to following the seasonal patterns and lifecycles of plants and animals. In the early stages of the project, Leonard began collecting phenologies – stories from people observing the irregular flowering or migration patterns in mammals, birds, plants, fish and fungi. The intimate, ritualistic space inside the tent houses a simple table and two chairs. According to Leonard (2019: 121), ‘the structure’s exterior honours careful observation of empirical phenomena, while the interior has been reserved for internal, inventive processes of question finding, contemplation and listening.’ The walls are a rainbow patchwork of overlapping pieces of recycled fabric, from red and tartan around the base to midnight blue on the ceiling. Leonard references spiritual architecture, including an oculus at the apex, letting in natural light, signifying the union between spirit and sky, and two mandalas flanking either side of the tent.

Leonard stresses that his readings are not intended to reject or replace science but to complement it. He articulates the role of Tarot divination as a process of taking the information received about climate and blending it with emotions, such as fear, anxiety, grief and anger. Leonard describes how people enter the tent, accustomed to ‘the tone of most climate-related reportage – distant, outsized, data-descriptive and depersonalised’ (p. 124). This account resonates with the dominant aesthetic strategies discussed in the first section, favouring quantitative research and larger scales of analysis. As I have argued, these strategies risk the immobilizing and anaesthetizing effects of infowhelm, neglecting the social context of knowledge production and dissemination. Leonard (2019: 125) reflects on his own personal evolution regarding what constitutes authoritative information: ‘As an adult, I’ve come to value technologically-enhanced perception and computational modelling – all the while undervaluing my mind’s own abilities to model and evaluate our uncountable futures’ (p. 125). This outsourcing of the imagination speaks to Tuck’s critique of raising awareness, where one’s knowing becomes contingent on larger and more powerful structures of knowing to make a difference. In a capstone essay on the project, Leonard surmises: ‘what if this is a problem not of communication but of reception – of concentration, contemplation, and focus? What if the real problem lies in our relationship to information and knowledge in general?’ (p. 127). To linger on the question of reception is to contemplate the strange experience of living with anthropogenic climate change: on the one hand, it is slow, ever-present, almost imperceptible, on the other, it is also punctuated with sharp moments of ‘crisis’ – bushfires, floods, droughts, and so on – breaking the surface of the present. We are always in climate crisis, we are always reeling from the fallout of a particular crisis, we are always anticipating more.

True to the clandestine conventions of Tarot, there are no public video recordings of Leonard’s readings with individual people. But in diaristic Facebook posts, he chronicles the conceptual and material evolution of the project, including vignettes of his conversations with people. He shares some of the questions asked in the tent: on the future of water in the mountain regions of Ecuador, what is the future of coal, and where we will relocate industrial agriculture when farming lands are no longer fertile enough. Where a traditional Tarot reading takes the querent’s personal crisis as a point of departure, the terrain of inter-personal relationships and career problems, Leonard experiments with a new spread (naming it ‘The Story of Place’) to stretch the scale and create a framework for crafting stories of a geographical nature. As a genre of storytelling, I wish to suggest that Tarot readings are consonant with fables as speculative narratives in the form of advice. Investigating the role of fables in feminist science studies, Martha Kenney (2019) critiques the common disparaging of didacticism as when ‘art tries too hard to teach’ and offers a new definition, which is to be ‘moved, influenced, and re-oriented through an aesthetic encounter with a text in unexpected ways’ (pp. 2–3). Also, fables are often dense with animals, plants and nonhuman others, recognizing the pull of forces that are less visible through an anthropocentric lens. By its nature, Tarot involves the production of chance – as the reading unfolds, the interpretation of the cards is not fixed but contingent on their position in the spread. As a result, there is a constant process of orienting, disorienting and reorienting, as one might read a map. Unlike fables, however, which might be distilled into a singular moral lesson, a Tarot reading holds open space for multiple truths: the truth of one’s emotional state, the truth of one’s relationship with others, and the truth of material realities, all of which are subject to work of negotiation.

Adelita Husni-Bey also uses Tarot as a cartographic method for engaging with ecological crisis. Her work The Reading/La Seduta (2017) focuses on the intersection between extractive capitalism and larger histories of colonial violence in the US. The Tarot reading featured in the film cultivates affective responses to that which is unfolding ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, thickening our web of proximities and distances in the unequal context of the Anthropocene. I first saw Husni-Bey’s The Reading as part of Il Mondo Magico (The Magical World), an exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani for the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. The viewer enters a dark industrial space with exposed brick walls. Strip lighting is looped around the perimeter, framing a large, suspended screen. In the centre of the space, there is an austere metal seating structure, coated with a mysterious sticky substance. The 16-minute film shows a Tarot reading with a group of US teenagers. It represents a slice of a two-week workshop, where Husni-Bey invited scholars and activists, such as Elizabeth A Povinelli and Julian Brave Noisecat, to lead sessions examining the impact of extractive capitalism from different perspectives. This is typical of the two-stage format in which Husni-Bey works – she initiates a participatory workshop on a theme or social issue, culminating in a material product to be exhibited in an artistic context. Unlike Leonard, she is more firmly invested in education. The core of her artistic practice is a commitment to anarcho-communist pedagogies and critiques of mainstream education. In terms of The Reading, Husni-Bey insists that what happens in a Tarot reading is always pedagogical, describing Tarot as a pedagogical–therapeutic device for working through a problem. Her approach also differs in that The Reading features a longer engagement with a small group of people. This group becomes a collective querent, departing from the one-on-one structure of a Tarot reading.

In preparation for The Reading, Husni-Bey designed 10 Tarot cards, representing the Major Arcana, printed with terms such as: ‘Extraction’, ‘Simulation’, ‘Vulnerability’, ‘Abstract Threat’, ‘Real Threat’, ‘Soil’ and ‘Dirt’. These customized black and white cards follow the semantic structure of traditional Tarot cards but depart from the feudal archetypes and iconographies. Instead, she incorporates symbols and references to recent anti-extractivist struggles, such as the 2016 Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL), an oil pipeline tracking through the lands of the Dakota Sioux tribe, threatening their access to clean drinking water (Estes, 2019). In the film, the participants are seated in a circle on the floor of a darkened room. They formulate a question (‘What is our spiritual connection to this land?’) and an unscripted reading unfolds. While Husni-Bey is present, artist Constantina Zavitsanos acts as the reader, inviting members of the group to flip cards and encouraging interpretation. A lot of conversation in The Reading involves the participants negotiating their relative privilege as the beneficiaries of extractive capitalism – the insulated conditions that allow some populations to live in comfortable denial while other populations are vulnerable to the shattering effects of environmental fallout. For instance, observing the ‘Abstract Threat’ card, one participant reflects: ‘It’s like . . . we can’t grow things on the soil here, but it doesn’t feel like something that affects me going to buy a soda at the bodega.’ The card itself shows a black snake intersecting a stream carving down a hillside. This is a reference to the Lakota prophecy about Zuzeca Sapa, a monstrous black snake that would unleash damage and destruction on the land. The Dakota Access Pipeline is the prophecy made manifest. In this moment, The Reading layers two divinatory systems. Together with the question guiding the reading, this poses a thought-provoking question: what does it mean, as settlers, to invoke spirits on stolen land?

At one point in The Reading, the conversation turns to a card labelled with the word ‘Simulation’ and revealed in the position referring to the subconscious forces influencing the querent. The card shows a child wearing a Virtual Reality (VR) headset and looking up at a paper crane against a swirling, hypnotic backdrop. One participant offers an interpretation: ‘it’s like they’re trying to deceive themselves . . . like the world around them isn’t smoking and burning up into ash in this weird, cosmic confusion.’ This interpretation of self-deception suggests the figure on the card is locked into a particular mode of seeing, marginalizing and omitting other modes of seeing. The group observe a sense of disembodied escapism associated with ‘enhanced’ vision. This recalls Leonard on outsourcing the imagination to computational modelling as well as the paradox of seeing too much and not enough in the Anthropocene, where the seductiveness and sheer weight of images, photographs and statistics can induce a counter-productive anaesthetic effect. So, we need to interrogate the habits of attention that structure a limited field of vision. The question is how our artistic and conceptual tools can facilitate situatedness and social connection rather than detachment and isolation. In addition to the main action of the Tarot reading, The Reading also includes short scenes that show the participants in cryptic tableaux. Husni-Bey asked them to illustrate their relationship to extractive capitalism using their bodies. These somatic exercises allow the participants to inhabit ambiguous feelings of ecological grief and disempowerment that might not translate into words. These scenes, and the haptic, embodied nature of the Tarot reading, produce an invitation to ‘see’ differently, reaching for an aesthetics that embraces more of the senses.

The enlivening of the senses is at the heart of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri’s artistic practice. Their work manifests as a series of conversations and performances using the healing arts: Tarot, astrology, palmistry and reiki. Ferreira da Silva is best known as a philosopher and Desideri has a background in movement studies and dance. One of their earliest public readings, Poethical Readings/Intuiting the Political, took place in 2015 at Arika art space in Glasgow. Ferreira da Silva and Desideri conducted a conversation with a live audience, using their own political problem to drive the session. Desideri prefaces the session and introduces the question: ‘How to image an ethics without the subject?’ Ferreira da Silva is seated at a desk and begins the Tarot reading, uncovering the cards one at a time in the Celtic Cross spread. Desideri replicates and annotates the spread on a large chalkboard on the floor. In 2016, they began the Sensing Salon, an ongoing series of intimate workshops, experimenting with different tools and asking participants to bring a question for discussion. Once again, the approach to sensing is twofold: intervening in the practice of ‘making sense’ of complex events and processes, and attuning the senses, reaching for a deeper level of understanding. Unlike Leonard and Husni-Bey, Da Silva and Desideri do not initiate readings focusing just on anthropogenic climate change. However, their enquiries are often existential and eco-philosophical in nature. For instance, on the global impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Ferreira da Silva (Ferreira da Silva et al., 2022: 141) reflects: ‘before people would come for a reading with a question or with a sense of having run out of ways of dealing with some question in a moment of crisis. Now it seems like existing itself is a crisis’. Indeed, such protracted crises threatening ecological and civilizational collapse require not just ‘solving a problem’ or reinstating control (a ‘fix’) but a more total process of rethinking how to exist together.

Ferreira da Silva and Desideri describe their practice as poethical readings. The term ‘poethical’ is borrowed from Joan Retallack (2003: 26), who writes:

a poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you’re to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of art’s significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world.

Retallack urges for modes of engagement that face up to complex and uncertain conditions, and new forms of agency that do not rest on heroic individuals. ‘To act at all’, she writes, ‘we need to pick up on so many cues that are not part of what we’re explicitly taught to notice’ (p. 22). This is what Retallack calls ‘reconfiguring geometries of attention’, sorting through what we are taught to notice and ignore. Ferreira da Silva and Desideri (2015) speak of imaging a situation, not as something static or singular, but rather as the interpretative labour of their poethical readings, unravelling and negotiating different aspects of the crisis in discursive stages. This is described as a process of de/re/composition, where the question is broken down into smaller components and the ‘answer’ is in the critical and creative work of composition. Ferreira da Silva and Desideri also invoke Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image. Benjamin (2003[1940]) describes the constructive principle of materialist historiography as when ‘thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock’ (p. 396). Benjamin sought to translate the aesthetic logic of montage into historiography and in doing so, unsettle what is naturalized as ‘the present’, bringing different temporalities into tension. So, much like a Tarot reading, the image does not cohere but exists as a constellation. This is instructive for rethinking environmental aesthetics, not in terms of an image but multiple (comprising multiple truths) held together in a spatio-temporal configuration.

I want to take a closer look at the question that sparked Ferreira da Silva and Desideri’s collaborative practice and draw out the ecological implications. Initially, their practice was framed around the specific question, ‘how to image an ethics without the subject’, and investigated through multiple tools and methods (including Tarot). The problem they identify is how the ‘I’ inscribes itself as the centre of existence, constructing a distance between subject and object. In this equation, the subject is something or someone who acts, and the object is acted upon. As Black, Indigenous and feminist critics of the Anthropocene argue (see Tsing, 2016; Verges, 2017), the proper subject, and default representative of the human species, is coded as white, male and European. The subject is something Ferreira da Silva and Desideri critique more explicitly and strenuously than Husni-Bey and Leonard. So, should the ‘I’ be abandoned or recalibrated to work against patriarchal and colonial human exceptionalism? The sovereign self assumes separation and secure boundaries, keeping the outside out and the inside in. However, coming back to the envelopment of hyperobjects, this kind of ‘I’ is untenable – it is impossible to detach and assume a safe distance. Jane Bennett (2020) offers an alternative model of subjectivity in a world of vibrant matter. Drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, she explicates a porous ‘I’ that is shaped through the rhythms of influx and efflux. Bennett draws particular attention to Whitman’s use of middle-voiced verbs that both perform and receive (to promulge, to sing, to animate), conglomerating the self with the world. This is ‘to bespeak and make alterations from within the fray’ (p. 112). To breach the boundaries of the self is to drink in subtle influences and atmospheres, to remake the self not as separate or against but amongst and within.

Affective cartography is about using the body and the senses to create maps for navigating the complexities of the present. Tarot, as a form of affective cartography, negotiates the messy relationship between personal and structural forces, working with the difficult, enigmatic aspects of living through climate crises while remaining accountable to a specific context. Leonard, Husni-Bey, and Ferreira da Silva and Desideri each take the notion of Tarot reader as spiritual guide as a point of departure in their collaborative, socially engaged artworks. James Leonard’s one-on-one readings offer a quiet space for disclosure, almost like a miniature church, where he invites the querent to unburden themselves of climate-related anxieties. For Leonard, the point is not to discern between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions but to fold them into the construction of a path, a map, in dialogue with material realities. Adelita Husni-Bey’s approach makes the latent pedagogical dimensions of a Tarot reading more explicit. The Reading/La Seduta navigates the profound unevenness of the so-called Anthropocene, charting between insulated pockets of protection and zones of radical exposure. Husni-Bey’s reading facilitates moments of generative discomfort amongst the teenagers, urging them to situate themselves ethically and politically. Tarot is just one of the tools Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri use in their poethical readings. These evolving sessions with various groups of people are attuned to the challenge of creating new shapes and patterns for deciphering existence. According to Desideri, their practice responds to a frustration with self-defeating patterns of thinking about one’s political activities – feeling one’s efforts are pointless or inadequate. The readings are intended to open up alternative ‘moves’ for understanding and intervening in the problem, using Tarot to remap the terrain of the possible. In proposing Tarot as a cartographic process, I am reminded of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s (2016: 3) invocation of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who ‘guides us to things that do not fit together – and yet somehow are together’. To linger on the ‘somehow’ is to practise new methods of connection and association. Such methods might seem ‘irrational’ and counter-intuitive but Leonard, Husni-Bey, and Ferreira da Silva and Desideri show how they can be rigorous and clarifying.

In the last week of the course I teach, Art and the Anthropocene; I ask students to read an article written by Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2019), who grapples with the role of small-scale initiatives, artistic and otherwise, in contributing to the overwhelming challenges of social and cultural adaptation. She articulates how this work involves drawing lines across seemingly unrelated struggles, which sometimes means decentring environmental symptoms:

the quest to save the climate alone does not address its causes. These are in some ways both bigger and smaller, more and less material: imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, industrial capitalism, militarisation, land enclosure. Put another way, if the environment is a body, these interlocking power structures are its diseases.

For these reasons, fighting climate crisis does not always look like fighting climate crisis. Indeed, as I have argued, a fixation on disembodied ‘looking’ at the large-scale consequences is part of the problem. It is impossible to think neatly, succinctly, about the epoch we are in and the diseases afflicting it. In this context, Tarot reading is a promising tactic because it thrives on a constellation of ideas and knowledge that require active participation. The fact that it does not cohere into a single image or answer is, I argue, more honest to the confounding, multi-scalar nature of the uneven Anthropocene. A key strength of Tarot is its composite character: absorbing, mixing and translating different knowledges. I want to argue that our knowledges should be promiscuous and incomplete. We should be willing to unpick the knots that separate and constrain categories of thought and action: to work out how to sit with the slow and the urgent, the spiritual and material, knowing and not knowing, to plot new movements and possibilities. There are no ‘big’ solutions without these small, iterative processes, riddled with fraught questions and unexpected tangents.