An Activist Tarot? (Week 3 Assignment)

So I really struggled with this assignment, because I ended up with too many ideas. I created some more conventional pieces with specific issues for each but then decided to think about the effort involved in activism, the sustainability and the drain as it were, of resisting oppression on a number of fronts. It all seems intertwined in a way that made it difficult for me to untangle one narrative difficult from the others. I found isolating one set of symbols very difficult.

Anyway, this is all a bunch of hedging. What I actually did for this project is to create a set of images (and they really only function as a set) based on the Major Arcana of the tarot deck. The tarot, while enjoying its moment as a part of white, Silver Lake hipsterdom, has traditionally been associated with  women (especially women of color), witchcraft, excess, rebellion, and the ability to see and/or change the future. The Major Arcana cards are supposed to represent a path from dangerous innocence to worldly experience and understanding. I wanted to see what would happen if I imagined this journey as an explicitly political one, the journey into activism on a number of fronts, to finding one's voice and persisting in sharing that voice through the trials that the cards represent.

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between art and activism this week, about how to create an image that mobilizes bodies, thoughts, action. I don't know that these achieve the movement that I would have liked. But I do think that they are a call to introspection or self-reflection -- I hope they ask us to think about where we are on a personal activist path and how contemporary activism can function as a spiritual journey. If that sounds cheesy, or broad, perhaps that's because it is. But I have always seen activism as a combination between spiritual/human calling and tactical/political planning. This project was my attempt to try and convey that combination in a bold, eye-catching way.

More specifically, I think that the words of the Major Arcana are provocative. They ask us to think about what constitutes "strength" or "love" or "evil". This is why I wanted to highlight those words, working primarily with bold typography and letting the images fill the words up. I'm happy to talk through these image choices in class, but each was chosen as a symbol of where or how these values have functioned in collective activism since the time of the last election. For me, these pieces are as much about that which is covered up as that which is revealed. I wanted these images to ask questions in the context of our attempt to change the face of our world, and to embolden us to think of this attempt as a belief system.

--Eli Dunn