Cross-Pollination: When Tarot Reading, DIY Pirate Radio, and Raw Cacao Rituals Intersect

»Tarot cards, radio antennas, and raw cacao beans are all »props« that we use to ask questions about our environments, our memories, and our relations to community and scale.«

Digital Solitude: Can you introduce us to your collective? What is your process of working together?  

Castle of Crossed Destinies: We are Aouefa, Olivia, and Sasha, and we come from different fields and practices. We met while on residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude between summer 2020 and spring 2021, which was marked by a very specific time of restricted travel and a sense of uncertainty about the future. We discovered a shared interest in radio, storytelling, and intersectional feminisms. During the winter months at the residency, we started meeting every Sunday to read and discuss texts together, while bringing our respective interests to the table and reflecting on how the personal, poetic, and political could be explored through our sessions. We took a cue from the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s story »The Castle of Crossed Destinies,« which offered us the strategy of using our different props for investigating new forms of sense-making in a situation in which we were searching for alternative vocabularies. 

Digital Solitude: What is your understanding of solidarity and how does it translate into your practice? 

CoCD: »The Castle of Crossed Destinies« perhaps offers a metaphor for our approach to solidarity. It describes a group of strangers meeting in a forest inn during the darkest part of winter. When the strangers realize that they have lost their capacity to speak, they use a deck of tarot cards to tell their life stories to each other. Tarot becomes a vehicle and platform for a common space of exchange. 

Our collaboration took a similar format, in that we focused on three different tools for sharing our stories with each other and building a collective methodology. This was not a collaboration founded on existing work, institutional positions, or disciplinary backgrounds. It was rather about meeting each other in physical and sonic spaces through the interventions of raw cacao rituals, amateur radio experiments, and tarot card readings. What emerged was an intimacy and a mode of understanding each other unique to this collaboration. For us, this is a form of solidarity.  

Digital Solitude: For the Web Residency, you chose to bring the practices of tarot reading, DIY pirate radio, and raw cacao rituals into a common dialogue by developing a card game. How do you imagine that this game will activate those different »frequencies« and the crossing, imagining, and exchanging of a set of thoughts? Can you unpack your interest in tarot/card games?  

CoCD: Tarot cards, radio antennas, and raw cacao beans are all »props« that we use to ask questions about our environments, our memories, and our relations to community and scale. These props operate in different modalities. While a raw cacao ritual attunes us to our biochemical and embodied feeling-states, a radio antenna gives us access to frequencies that have traversed cities, oceans, and continents. Tarot offers a set of archetypes through which to pose questions about identity and ways of being. Yet, within each of these props there is significant complexity. Raw cacao derives its power from many different chemicals that produce different embodied states; a radio antenna receives a range of frequencies simultaneously; a tarot deck has many figures, from the Major to Minor Arcana. We are also aware of historical entanglements of these props with imperialism, military technology development and classist representations. 

In the game, we wanted to draw from this complexity and friction to cross-pollinate and intersect the chemicals of raw cacao, the frequencies of radio, and the archetypes of tarot. This allows us to hone in on the variations and nuances within each of our practices while speculating on how they might inform each other and sharpen the questions we ask of ourselves and our work as feminists.  

»What emerged was an intimacy and a mode of understanding each other unique to this collaboration. For us, this is a form of solidarity.« 

Digital Solitude: In the long run you aim to create three card decks based on the Major Arcana. During the Web Residency, you begin with creating one figure from each deck. Can you tell us more about those three figures? 

CoCD: Indeed we want to develop three card decks or »houses« based on the chemicals of raw cacao, the frequencies of radio, and the archetypes of tarot, respectively. To present the game, we developed three prototype cards with the figures of the molecule anandamide, Le Diable and the 7 Mhz radio frequency and accompanying monologues which introduce the cards to the players.  

Anandamide is an important neurotransmitter present in raw cacao. It is responsible for »runner’s high« and our brain produces it when we exercise, meditate, cuddle, listen to relaxing music, or stroke a pet. We created the anandamide card to invite the reader to consider joy, delight, and self-care as radical political practices.  

Seven Mhz has long been a favorite frequency of radio amateurs, and has the peculiar ability to travel locally during the day, and over oceans and continents at night. We felt this frequency offered a series of queries about locality and translocality, the ways we are simultaneously invested in our immediate communities, yet connected and entangled with places and communities we have never visited.  

Le Diable, also known as the Devil, is the fifteenth card of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck. The Devil spoke to us as a card that questions established norms and institutions through unbounded desire and creativity. It can also be interpreted as more queer than others of the same deck, as it portrays a figure of multiple genders. So, the Devil questions narratives of the Self, of how one formulates desire and disobedience and puts that into action.  

Digital Solitude: How did your proposal develop during the Web Residency?  

CoCD: Over the period of the residency, we met online weekly. Our initial idea to lead a workshop in Berlin quickly became unfeasible due to time and budget constraints. Early in the residency, we landed on the idea of producing a game that would ultimately become a diagram or a format for future workshops or for individual/collective moments of play.  

Digital Solitude: Your individual approaches as artists are multidisciplinary, from exhibition making to research-based and field works, to audiovisual encounters and multisensorial pieces and workshops. How did you intend to facilitate these multisensory experiences and encounters within your Web Residency project? 

CoCD: This is something that has been very important to us when doing the trilogy of the »Castle of Crossed Destinies« sonic interventions. We did the recordings in one of our studios, where we set up a table full of props and objects that served to trigger the conversation. Every session was hosted by one of us and our respective props, whilst weaving in and out of personal memories, feminist theory, and histories of our technologies. Our encounters were always accompanied by something to eat or drink, and objects that triggered sensorial experiences.  

The game will serve as an embodied tool or technology for future workshops, with prompts for exploring your body in relation to your environment. To make it more sensuous, we will also record the monologues of the cards as spoken-voice tracks that one may listen to while playing. In a workshop setting, we may also involve aspects of meditation, live radio tuning or raw cacao. This is something that we’re currently experimenting with to bring the cards into the realm of the senses. 

Digital Solitude: For translating your intimate physical experiences into a collective (digital) encounter, you will need a clear structure, clear principles, and rules. Is there already a concrete direction here? 

CoCD: Yes! The game has a clear, yet open-ended structure for self- and collective discovery. The querents will pick one or several cards with an intention in mind – very much like a traditional tarot card reading. The cards will be read and interpreted alone or together to provoke further reflection and self-questioning. In contrast to other games, there is no scenario of »win-lose.« More closely related to speculative fictions and divination, the Castle of Crossed Destinies game will center subjective explorations of the mind-body connection and the dynamic relationships between individuals and collectives. 

Denise Helene Sumi (Digital Solitude) conducted this interview in collaboration with Anca Rujoiu
If not stated otherwise, all images courtesy of Castle of Crossed Destinies.