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Paper short abstract:

A workshop/s using a decolonial, BIPOC-centred, community-oriented tarot deck designed to help groups explore the role(s) they have to play in challenging the climate crisis and deepening interpersonal relationships with the more-than-human universe.

Paper long abstract:

In collaboration with a team of Guatemalan, Brazilian, Chilean, Congolese, Zambian, German, Irish & English artists, I’ve developed a deck of tarot cards - called the Taiao Tarot (Maori for earth or environment) - designed to help groups explore the role(s) they have to play in fighting the climate crisis and deepening their own relationships with the natural world.

The 22 Major Arcana cards in the deck each depict a specific responsibility within the climate movement/our communities: for example, teacher, mediator, healer, storyteller or organiser. In contrast to the traditional tarot deck, the cards' imagery and language is BIPOC-centred and non-gendered. We may each embody a different role or roles at different stages of our lives; uncovering which roles we are currently inhabiting, and which we want to inhabit - or, importantly, may be avoiding - can help us move towards building more aligned, climate-resilient communities and understanding how we are meant to live together.

I seek to host a series of workshops helping attendees intuitively connect to their own roles and explore these in a group context, with the aim of understanding how individual talents and skills can best intersect to create more climate-conscious, more-than-human-friendly generations, universities and workforces. These workshops will explore how analogue technologies can offer solutions to the climate crisis that focus on interpersonal connection, and how these can be used to challenge existing social hierarchies and Western-centric perspectives on environmentalism by highlighting the work of indigenous, queer, and Black community organisers.