Lake Studios Berlin

This speculative tarot deck comes complete with a Minor and Major Arcana. The Minor Arcana consists of over 550 cards — the participants — including the several hundred who joined the forum online, a live audience of nine professional artists, a four-person Lake Studio organizational team, and the two forum moderators, Mårten Spångberg and Alex Viteri. The Minor Arcana’s purpose is to process the forum’s presentations and further our collective knowledge-making on dance and ecology. 

The Major Arcana comprises six cards, to wit, the Forum’s invited speakers. Let’s interpret each of the Major Arcana using A Non-definitive Guide to the About Dance Cards. This non-definitive guide draws on conversations and feedback from many of the forum’s participants. Do keep in mind, there are as many interpretations of the Major Arcana as there are individuals who listened to the presentations. Feel free to write your own guide to the cards (and share it with us here at Lake Studios Berlin). 

The Major Arcana Cards 

I The Nina Power 

PICTURE: A small stick 

CROSSINGS: Technology, Health, Public Space, Degrowth 

ADVECTOR: Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality  

Interpretation: 

We could eliminate all technology, erase it from humanity completely, but somewhere, someone will find a stick and pick it up. They will use the stick to reach fruit in the high branches of a tree. Someone else will observe this behavior and mimic it, perhaps take it a step further by attaching a heavy rock to the stick and using it as a projectile to reach even higher fruit. This play between individual discovery and collective innovation will continue, on and on, until we arrive once again to a world where “Zoom fatigue” is a thing. 

The Nina Power card is not saying we shouldn’t use technology, but rather encouraging us to be acutely aware of the metaphysical impact that technology has on humanity. 

This card represents a return to public space as a realm of generative potential.  

As a “blockage” card, The Nina Power warns you not to get locked into a set identity. As a “you now” card, it encourages you to have some fun with your artist biography.  

In a “future” position, this card says: 

“Nature will be the new punk” 

II The André Lepecki  

PICTURE: A dismantled doomsday clock  

CROSSINGS: Ecology of Ideas, Ecology of Time, Rock Formations 

ADVECTOR: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind 

Interpretation: 

The André Lepecki is an intricate card that questions the category of time by drawing on phenomena ranging from the way humans propagate error to the spurning of nostalgia to the study of rocks. This card counsels you to look forward by looking — or better said, listening — back. 

In looking back, The André Lepecki highlights the value of work in art and adjacent spaces carried out between 1968 and 1977. The artists, philosophers, poets, musicians and filmmakers of this period did not write for their peers. They made work for us. For you. Right here and now. If we bring their voices together, we hear a collective choir, a pack of dogs howling at the moon, singing a warning for the future. The André Lepecki card is telling you to listen to the howls of the past.  

How to listen? Grow ears on your spine and climb some rocks. 

Your task as artist? Keep singing the song.  

In a “you now” position, this card speaks best through an online participant, Eleni: 

“I … attempt to express various qualities in one form, combining the impression of the solid skin of the stones, with the softness and elegance of tiny flowers which grow on them, and light insects flying around. I see the elements as a unified entangled system, similarly to how Andre explained our inseparability from the stones.” 

III The Jota Mombaça 

PICTURE: A black space 

CROSSINGS: Opacity, Colonial Critique, Migration, Speculative Fiction 

ADVECTOR: Édouard Glissant’s theories of opacity  

Interpretation: 

The Jota Mombaça is a potent card. The first thing to do when you draw this card is turn off your camera and listen. The Jota Mombaça speaks to you through sonic fiction, narrated by a telepathic shape-shifter who, confined in colonial language, is attempting to navigate from a state of terror to a place of thriving. 

Some are frightened by the witch-like nature of this card, but do not be deterred. When you recognize the potential in words, re-embody the force fields of language, and slip through the cracks of poetry, then you find an opening to reclaim your power. This card is about finding your own fluidity as a survival strategy — a way of slipping through the cracks to your own rebirth.  

One live participant put it this way: “Though I am listening to a story, I feel it physically –  my body is contracted and expanded all at once.” 

As an archetype,The Jota Mombaça asks you to think about what you bring to the conversation of cosmic dance. 

In a “future” position, this card says: 

“Babygirl, be open to surprise.” 

IV The Jana Unmüßig & Miriam Jakob  

PICTURE: A series of islands in a blue sea. A small boat floating between the islands 

CROSSINGS: Choreography, Research Methodologies, Breath 

ADVECTOR: Lisa Densem: dancer and breathwork practitioner 

Interpretation: 

The Jana Unmüßig & Miriam Jakob is a soft card — it has no single agenda and is open to many interpretations. The islands pictured on the card represent the many destinations to which the small boat might orient. There is no map and no set pattern. You may meander from island to island, charting a different course each time you set sail. One island might introduce you to a performance artist working with screaming, another might present you with reflections on writing from the breath, another with anatomical drawings … The most important message of The Jana Unmüßig & Miriam Jakob card is that wherever you go, and in whatever order you go there, always remember to breathe! 

As a “destiny” card, The Jana Unmüßig & Miriam Jakob point you towards fractional knowledge and performative publishing. 

In a “Jorge” or “Sidney” (online participants) position, this card asks how one shapes the freedom of user/audience experience digitally, and how meandering might function when one is at an impasse. 

In a “future” position, this card says: 

“knowledge is a process”  

V The Julian Reid 

PICTURE: A screenshot of your Amazon.com purchase history showing five self-help books, three different massage tools, and one Romantic Comedy movie rental 

CROSSINGS: Resilience, Security, Neo-liberalism 

ADVECTOR: C.S. Holling’s theories of ecological resilience  

Interpretation: 

Have you spent the last year building up resilience to an unpredictable force of nature that might rise up out of nowhere and blow you over? As an artist, have you always possessed a certain resilience against struggle, scarcity, criticism, and/or insufficient resources? If you answer yes to these questions, then do you celebrate your individual pliancy, or do you ask, “Why must I alone be responsible for my own fortitude”? The Julian Reid card says it is time to examine Resilience with a capital “R”. For contrary to what we have been led to believe, the resilience we pride ourselves on can indicate the opposite of security.  

As a “society” card, The Julian Reid encourages deeper critical thinking around common conceptions of ecological and human justice. 

This card is meant to challenge you intellectually, and as one live participant put it “turn your thoughts upside down”. 

VI The Filipa Ramos 

PICTURE: A figure, fallen on ice, laughing. In the corner, we see an ancient hand reaching in to help the figure to their feet 

CROSSINGS: Art, Film, Nature, Animals, Joy 

ADVECTOR: Simone Forti: artist, dancer, choreographer and writer 

Interpretation: 

The Filipa Ramos is a beloved card in the About Dance Tarot deck. As one live participant describes this card, “it invites you in”. This is a joyful, playful and kind card, symbolizing the rich history upon whose shoulders the current field of dance stands. It is about the depth of character, sense of curiosity, and attunement to the natural — the edges and the fringes — that make for a well attuned, hybrid artist. The Filipa Ramos demonstrates how art can question the exhibitionary apparatuses of nature and helps you rethink how you might frame ecology in your own dance practice.  

This card says enough of the talking, it is time to go forth and dance with confidence, for you are now a bona fides part of About Dance: Forming Futures! 

As an “advice for the future” card, The Filipa Ramos keeps it simple and quotes Simone Forti: 

“Be a being among others” 

The Reading 

Mårten brings a riddle to the forum: are we looking at “dance in relation to ecology, or ecology in relation to dance”?  

Jota might respond with their own twist of words: “the dance is the home now, and we are home to the dance” 

But perhaps the heart of this tarot reading is best surmised by Stefanie, a live participant, when she says, “go back to [your] dreams and continue dreaming about what is possible”.  

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. 

Bateson, Gregory. 2000 [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press. 

Cadena, Marisol De La. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Caillois, Roger. 1985 [1970]. The Writing of Stones (L’écriture des pierres). University Press of Virginia.  

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2018. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Górska, Magdalena. 2016. Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability. Linköping University Press. 

Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia Press 

Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. Vol 4 :1-23. 

Illich, Ivan. 2001 [1973]. Tools for Conviviality. Marion Boyars Publishers.  

Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements.  Durham: Duke University Press. 

Segato, Rita. 2015. La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos. Y una antropología por demanda. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Prometeo libros. 

Seremetakis, Nadia. 1996 [1994]. The Senses Still. University Of Chicago Press.  

Spångberg, Mårten , ed. 2018. Movement Research. Swedish Art Council / Black Box teatret Oslo. PDF link 

Virilio, Paul. 2009. Grey Ecology.  Atropos Press.  

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. Métaphysiques cannibales. Lignes d’anthropologie post-structurale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 

Andre Lepecki is a writer and curator working mainly on performance studies, choreography and dramaturgy. He is a Professor and the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He has published widely and edited several anthologies.

Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work derives from poetry, critical theory, and performance. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Through performance, visionary fiction, and situational strategies of knowledge production, they intend to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium.

Nina Power is a cultural critic, Philosopher and social theorist. She was a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zero) and the forthcoming What Do Men Want? (Penguin). She is currently teaching at the Mary Ward Centre in London. Her recent work concerns freedom, health, dialogue and reconciliation.

Filipa Ramos is a curator, art critic and editor based in London. Among many other projects she is the co-curator together with Lucia Pietroiusti the symposia series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, 2018-ungoing. Her research focuses on how moving images address environmental and ecological topics and in particular on the modes in which artists’ cinema fosters interspecies relationships across humans, nonhumans and machines.

Julian Reid is Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland. He is the author and coauthor of several books including Biopolitics of the War on Terror, Becoming Indigenous (with David Chandler), The Neoliberal Subject (also with Chandler), Resilient Life (with Brad Evans), and The Liberal Way of War (with Michael Dillon).

Mårten Spångberg is a performance related artist living and working in Stockholm. His interests concern choreography in an expanded field, something that he has approached through experimental practices and creative processes in multiplicity of formats and expressions. 

Jana Unmüßig with Miriam Jacob, is a Helsinki-based artist with a background in choreography. 2019/2020 she held a post-doc position at the Center for Artistic Research Uniarts where she received a doctorate in 2018. In collaboration with Berlin-based choreographer and performer Miriam Jakob, she currently conducts the artistic research project “Breathing With” in the frame of the Berlin Artistic Research Program.
www.jana-unmussig.com

Miriam Jakob is a choreographer and anthropologist focusing on the interface between science and fiction. She graduated from the MA Choreography at the Theaterschool of Amsterdam (DAS Choreography), holds a BA in dance, context, choreography and an MA in Anthropology.

Alex Viteri is a South American performer and scholar based in Berlin. These days, working mostly at the threshold of the visual arts and dance. Viteri grew up alongside the Andes and, Ruco Pichincha and Cotopaxi continue to hunt her artistic practice. Inspired by feminist decolonial activists and thinkers, her research cares for alternative modes of knowledge and the sharing of brown affects. Mapped to the Closest Address.wordpress.com