Reading With Echo

The Empress

The Empress, card number 3, in the conventional cisheteropatriarchal text of the Tarot, is said to represent the feminine. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, she is depicted in a field, representing abundance given by nature, and is also described as nurturing, creative – the figure is said to be pregnant.

In the Echo Deck, The Empress corresponds to the integration of Generosity and is inspired by Ai Ogawa’s poem Dread (297). The key here is integration, which refers to a moment when there is already an acknowledgement of existence as that generative movement of re/de/composition. It does not have an end, a direction and it is not about the realization of a particular thing but of that infinity: the generous movement of composition that brings things in and out of actual space and time. Here this integration expresses through an awareness of implicancy – which  comes with the integration – that is given through pain, as it is experienced at the elemental level. That is, it refers to those moments when one realizes that there is no separation between thinking and feeling, and in doing so, it also becomes evident that the pain one feels is an expression of a general pain, which of course can only be acknowledged with the integration, that is, when one finds their own existence a moment in that infinity. Such moments, which are related to how implicancy shows the elementality of pain, through an awareness of the inseparability of thinking and feeling, usually manifest as anxiety generated by encountering the limits of formal thinking. That is, as that sense of losing one’s grounds, and feeling emotionally vulnerable when the tools of formal thinking fail to deliver the security – certainty, mastery, etc –  they are said to be able to do.

In some works in this exhibition, we’ve found various images of the Snake, which corresponds to the element Earth. We took the Spiral as the image that conveys Generosity as it is given by The Empress.

We found the spiral in the shape of Carolina Caycedo’s snake A Cobra Grande, the earth in the work of Cecilia Vicuña and the spiral in the hanging bike tires in her installation Sonoran Quipu. The Earth, as a planet and an element, appears in Maria Thereza Alves’s work Navel/Center (surrounded by mountains and water), in the Candice Lin’s working of clay. The snake skin structures the installation of Tabita Rezaire and Yussef Agbo-Ola and we founda rendering of the generosity of Earth both in Manjot Kaur’s She Gave Birth to an Ecosystem II and in Dana Whabira’s objects.

Dread

by Ai

Reading for the question: How to read The Empress in the Echo deck?