Reclaiming Narrative Practices: Tarot as Method

Tarot has often been coded as an ‘alternative’ practice, relegated to the realm of the occult, spiritual, or pseudo-scientific. But what would it mean to reframe tarot as a viable, valuable mode of meaning-making, a narrative practice that meaningfully expresses experiences that are cast to the margins?

This hybrid event explores tarot as a tool for relaying embodied experiences and relational, political commitments; we demonstrate how tarot has been used in various spaces to define and decipher connections to the individual and communal bodies. We will unpack the historical narrativisation of tarot before replotting its practice and politics within queer death and decolonial thought. These spaces are fundamentally concerned with subjectivity, temporality, and epistemology: who is seen as an agentive character, what is our relationship to life and death, and what is authenticated as knowledge? We will demonstrate how tarot – as a textual encounter – becomes a way of reclaiming the bodies and bodies of knowledge that a Western Cartesian and colonial worldview casts outside its purview of care.

To this end, we will use the workshop as a space to radically imagine how tarot might be deployed within academic contexts to repair these relationships to knowledge and power.

About the speakers

Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and writer based on an island in Finland. She is co- founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and has worked with and on islands for nearly two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili. Her latest work Materia Medica of Islandswas previewed at Vallisaari, Helsinki Biennial in 2023. In addition to her filmmaking and art practice, Petronella is a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. She also writes poems, makes soundscapes, and runs a podcast called Little screams.

Kelechi Anucha is a Lecturer in Literature and Environmental Justice at the University of Manchester, and Programme Director of the MA in Arts, Culture and Environments, a course which addresses the complex context of the climate crisis through critical and creative practice. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University and Co-lead of the Wellcome Trust funded Black Health and the Humanities Network.

Arya Thampuran is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University and co-lead of the Black Health and the Humanities Network in her day job, and a yoga instructor pre-sunrise/post-sunset. These roles capture her interests in mental health and healing, engaging with communal knowledges and practices around wellbeing. Her work is broadly situated at the intersection of the medical humanities and critical race studies; she is interested in how creative practitioners in contemporary African diasporic contexts express distress and healing, in ways that re-script prevailing psychiatric narratives of illness and wellness. Principally, her work is committed to a decolonial and intersectional approach.

This event is hosted by The Narrative Practices Lab of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.

This hybrid event is free to attend. The zoom link will be shared closer to the date.