Strength, card number 8, in the Ride-WAite-Smith deck is said to represent inner strength, the capacity to overcome hardship and challenges through wisdom rather than physical force. It is depicted as a female character gently opening the mouth of a lion, she has the infinity symbol hovering over her head as a sign of wisdom.

In the Echo Deck, card number 8, which is inspired by Ai Ogawa’s poem Jericho (53), corresponds to the realization of inseparability, through an experience of syntony. The key movement is that something that figures inseparability in actual space and time, in the context in which we assume everything as being separate, discrete, entities. Inseparability is manifested concretely. It arrives through the very experience of pain, the movement of working through pain, which probably occurs over a long period of time, and which can be continuous or discontinuous. From this working through pain one gathers that there is no separation of pleasure and pain, and through this working, one is able to sense (at once to think and feel) that sociality extends beyond what is actual, that it is deep, and with that one also gets a glimpse of the possibility of transformation, the sense that transformation is not something that occurs and is experienced separately, individually, but that it is already an aspect of  elemental sociality. The realization of inseparability is experienced as sintony: as the experience of resonating with each other and everything else. At the same time, the very experience of sintony, of sensing this material capacity, is also what hosts the possibility of pleasure, making pain and pleasure inseparable.

In other works in the Green Snake exhibition, we’ve found variations on the shape of a flame, or energy fields, which correspond to the element of Fire. To image it, we have chosen the Synodic Curve to convey Syntony as it is given by Strength.

We find syntony in Guo Fengyi’s ink drawings of energetic pathways traversing human and more than human bodies, in the cosmic bodies of Ann Leda Shapiro’s Healing Scrolls, and in the elemental processes of Lavanya Mani’s No Man’s Land. We sense syntony in the portals opened by Lhola Amira’s installation Philisa (To Heal: Ascend the Messenger), in the sound and smell of Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun’s The Life and Death of Bamu Dakini, and in Karan Shrestha’s drawing Shared Sensualities.