SPILL TAROT

• SPILL TAROT BOOK

• Robert Pacitti, London, England - 2009

For the Introduction to an accompanying book included with the limited edition SPILL Tarot, Robert wrote:

‘What you hold in your hands is an extraordinary thing - a project genuinely borne of mass collaboration. Radical indeed. Whilst the over-arching architecture of the tarot may be aeons old, the response presented here is made by twenty-two contemporary mavericks working in coalition with one exceptional photographer. This project is built on trust, risk-taking, and shared visions. It has been a brave undertaking for all involved, including the design team who worked tirelessly to ensure its formal integrity, as well as developing all 56 cards of the Minor Arcana.

For many centuries the tarot has been used as a method of divination. Across cultures it has survived wars, plagues, holy uprisings and fashionable mores. Some consider it a repository of ancient occult learning - a map of all knowledge for study or meditation in and of itself; others assert the tarot as a prompt for self-reflection, a mirror within which we may glimpse ourselves from unorthodox angles; there are those who use the tarot as a tool for psychic engagement or clairvoyance - a trigger to intuition bypassing that censor which stands between the ego and the unconscious: what Aleister Crowley defined as “the knowledge of the nature and powers of one’s own being”.

With this in mind, the tarot stands as viable a means of interpreting the world as any other - including science, philosophy or mathematics - and I defy any skeptic to prove otherwise. For whilst it is sometimes dismissed as no more than a prop that serves the superstitious, I offer that there is tremendous power in anything that can move unseen - under the radar - of a bland, homogenous, patronisingly prescriptive and increasingly globalised popular culture. The tarot then is indeed a powerful tool, for artists, occultists, seers, anthropologists, adventurers, old souls, and seekers.

This project was made as part of the SPILL Festival of Performance. At the time of writing, SPILL is the UK’s premiere artist-led programme of experimental theatre, live art and performance. I established the festival in 2007 as a tactic for forcing change in a cultural landscape that until then lacked any substantial, high-profile, international platform for sustaining radical practice. The festival enables artists to storm the ‘traditions’ of how our work gets presented, and to self-define our own contexts for what and how we show. In this years festival there are almost 100 live performances and contextualising events by a world-class line up of radical makers. A project like The SPILL Tarot is possible because everyone involved recognises that the festival is all about creating alliances, pushing experimentation, and finding new modes of collaboration.

In some ways this has been a hard project to make because of the sheer amount of tarot packs and information already out there. We are not experts and do not claim to be. Nor does this project claim to represent the practices of each participating artist either. But something seemed to click with almost everyone we mentioned the project to during its making, and that is its potential to platform the universal.

Without exception the people who appear on these cards are all truly bright stars within the broad terrain of contemporary live work. Their practices span visual art, performance, body work, dance, theatre, music, philosophy, academia, cultural activism and much more. It is an honour that each and every one of them has collaborated on this project. May their visions haunt us all.

The collaborative process of forming ideas and images between photographer Manuel Vason and each of the people present on these cards has been amazing to witness. Every image is a true collaboration, led initially by ideas coming from each invited artist and then shaped, challenged, shifted (and in some cases even brilliantly sabotaged) by Manuel - in order to push the possibilities of each image as far as was possible within the time and resources available. Manuel has been extraordinarily committed to this project and I am awed by his hard work and dedication. He was my only real choice of photographer, and without his vision, skill, and passion the SPILL Tarot simply wouldn’t exist in the way that it does.

The hard work and insights of Carla Esperanza Tommisini have also been fundamental to the success of this project. She has kept it on track whilst simultaneously pushing its potential at every opportunity.

I believe that when art is at its best it respects the intelligence of its audiences, and this project attempts to do just that. Whilst it is non-narrative (apart from fool’s journey) in spending time with it – getting to know it – one can accumulate information, thoughts, ideas, reflections and possibilities. It begs as many questions as it proffers answers. It is built on placing elements of various tarot traditions in relation to the potential of ephemeral performance. For me personally, this is its activist core. And whilst it now exists as a physical product that you can hold - maybe even cherish - its entire reason for being remains one of process. Slippery. Mercurial. Motion. Flux. Magick.’