2 Weeks Online Class
Dates: Sundays June 12 & 19, 2022
Time: 2 pm - 4 pm EDT (8 pm Paris Time; 7 pm London Time; 11 am Los Angeles Time)
Admission: $99 Patreon members / $110 general admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that timeTaught via Zoom by Morbid Anatomy Programing Director Laetitia Barbier.

Please note: Zoom invites are sent five days before the first class meeting. If you do not receive it, please email us at info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com.

Welcome to the Surrealist Tarot Parlor! A new series of Tarot classes with Laetitia Barbier exploring the surrealist gaze, image-making and legacy applied to contemporary Tarot practice. The surrealist Tarot parlor is a cozy, experimental laboratory, a place of poetic foreplay in which we’ll be able to informally indulge in magical iconographical explorations, through games and artful activities.

From its early beginning in the 1920s, the Surrealist movement championed artistic exploration through methods such as free association, automatic writing and exquisite corpses - collective drawing or texts made without knowing the others’ contribution. Inspired by Psychoanalysis, the surrealists used playfulness, group exercises and the quest for liminal states to subvert their own predictability and free themselves from the constraints of the rational mind. Surprise, accident, and reveries brought to the surface the inarticulate visions of the subconscious and unlocked the doors of creation.

In the same way, Tarot as an intuitive and introspective practice forces us to reconcile with our own imagination, to contemplate what’s hidden within us, and use it as materia prima to reinvent our own narrative. In this class, we’ll behave like Surrealism resurrectionists, unearthing the avant-garde group’s creative methodology, unapologetically applying it to Tarot tradition and seeing what chance encounters we reveal.

Our first Opus will be dictated by the Surrealist concept of “Convulsive Beauty,” a notion discussed by Andre Breton’s novel Nadja, in which images are made beautiful through their power to provoke, transgress and challenge our idea of attraction/repulsion or what’s. By looking the work of Max Ernst, Remedios Varo, Andre Breton, Claude Cahun—along with historical tarot decks and by doing creative activities and Tarot exercises—we’ll meet our deck’s unfamiliar elegance and discover new ways to meet the meaning of the cards.

Each student will be given access to a virtual classroom in which they’ll find an archive of visual resources and texts, a workbook of activities and many other documents linked to Tarot and the Surrealist movement to further their research. This two weeks class with two online Zoom meetings will prepare students for their (facultative) final assignment which will be a Tarot card of their choosing, done with the help of the surrealist techniques taught in class.

This class is welcoming all students, whatever decks or tarot experience they might have.

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. She is the author of “Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive” published by Abrams in 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Image:

The Surrealist, Victor Brauner, 1947.

Frontispiece for Aveux Non Avenue, Claude Cahun, 1929-30.

Carta de Tarot, Remedios Varo, 1957.

Portrait of Max Ernst as The Hermit, Leonora Carrington, 1939

Collage from Une Semaine de Bonte, Max Ernst, 1934.