Time: 2 pm EST
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE
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In his 1973 novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italian author Italo Calvino relates the tale of a group of travelers who, having lost their voice, re-articulate their life stories with the help of Tarot cards, using the 15th Century Visconti-Sforza deck. Morphed into a new visual dialect with 78 words of vocabulary, Calvino's novel beautifully exemplifies how Tarot’s evocative power transcends speech and helps us formulate new ways to communicate who we are.
Although Tarot was invented as a card game during the Renaissance, we tend to associate it with divination and as an introspective tool. Yet, if cards are meant to be read, one can wonder what language is it that they ultimately speak? Like any other form of communication with a 600 years history span, the way we understand the Major Arcana has evolved, being reinvented from one generation to the next. What did these images mean at the time they were used in early decks, and what do they mean to us today? For Antoine Court de Gebelin, meeting the cards felt like listening to the “rhapsody of bizarre and extravagant figures.” Somehow, by looking at the polysemic nature of the hyperbolic images throughout time, we come to realize that there is no “true Tarot,” and that its incredible value comes from its inherent versatility - weaving highbrow and lowbrow - an idiosyncratic language spoken in many voices.
In this talk, and to celebrate Laetitia’s book Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive, the author will present Tarot as a visual culture in motion, by looking at it through the lens of art history, iconology and pop culture. If images barely change, what we read in them does. By looking at the example of the Hanged Man, we’ll be conjuring the accidental scholarship of Hannibal Lecter, crime and punishment in Renaissance Italy, Saint Sebastian—and. why not, Hello Kitty!--to show how Tarot’s subjectivity ultimately helps us find our unique voice and reclaim our own narrative.
French born Laetitia Barbier is an independent scholar, as well as professional tarot reader and teacher. She earned a Bachelor Degree in Art History from La Sorbonne University Paris in 2009. Laetitia has worked with Morbid Anatomy since 2012 as a programming director, head librarian and occasional curator. Her new book “Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive” published by Abrams will be out in December 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.