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Tarot Exploded

Date
19 May 2022
Tarot Exploded

Centro de Arte y Ciencia (CEAC), UTN Mar del Plata Regional Faculty, and negra 40 present:

Tarot Exploded — Narratives and symbologies in the 21st century

Online course, taught by Ana Groch and Mariela Ocanto.

Format: online seminar, synchronous / asynchronous. Classes will be recorded and uploaded to the campus platform for the three months the course runs, plus two additional months. Live attendance is recommended for discussion and practical exercises.

Schedule: starts May 19, 2022, ends August 25. Classes: Thursdays, April through June, 7 pm. Duration: 24 hours. Conversation with the instructors: Wednesday, March 23, 5 pm (Argentina time).

Support: Negra40.

Presentation

The Renaissance opens a new path in Western culture: a perspective on truth grounded in experimentation, together with a renewed trust in magical thinking, merged as the prelude to what we now call modern science. That meeting point between dream and reality, reason and speculation — however distorted and violent — still beats within our culture, with effects visible in movements like flat-earthism, QAnon, and other conspiracy theories around 5G and vaccines.

More interesting still are the ways art and its objects have channeled this situation, evident in exhibitions such as La luz negra (CCCB, 2019), The Encyclopedic Palace (Venice Biennale, 2013), or The Language of Birds: Occultism and Art (80WSE Washington, 2016), among others. In this tension between reason and intuition, between interpretation and symbolic exegesis, the Tarot orbits as a sacred artifact and producer of archetypal narratives.

In this course, the Tarot and art are the subject, and the border joining them is what matters: we’ll dwell on the symbols and narratives of the Major Arcana, on their visual sediment and conceptual richness, to see how they’re expressed in contemporary art and in today’s philosophies.

The proposal

We’ll approach the tarot carefully, the way one approaches a book: a book made of 22 cards whose figures reach back to a foundational, intercultural archetypal past, one that must be read creatively. We’ll immerse ourselves in the 22 Major Arcana, in their symbols and details, in the small and the large that inhabits each image. Once this “tower” is secured, we blow it up: the course unfolds the creative forces of each Arcanum outward, updated in two author decks created in the 20th and 21st centuries — the Tarot OMEGALAND, by Joe and Karen Boginski, and the Tower Takeover Tarot, by Kaylani Perisho — finally channeled through the interpretations of contemporary visionary artists.

Bios

Ana Groch — Art historian, Master’s in Cultural Administration and Cultural Management, specialist in Performing Arts and Performance. Advisor to Argentina’s Ministry of Culture on Art Markets and lecturer at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Director of “Proyecto Cúpulas.” Launched “El Tarot del Tango” with Marianne Costa, featuring 22 contemporary Argentine artists. Trained in Tarology with Alejandro Jodorowsky, Marianne Costa and Andrea Vitali.

Mariela Ocanto — Industrial engineer trained in art appraisal, having advised Banco Ciudad in that field. Self-taught tarot reader, sixth generation in a family of tarot readers. Specializes in the intersection of tarot, psychology and art. Taught metaphysics, tarot and art for ten years alongside Lic. María del Carmen Calvo at the Centro Cultural Armenio and at Malba.

Press coverage of the instructors

Tarot Exploded