This project is a collaboration between artistic researcher and artist Doina Kraal, artist Roger Cremers, and Professor Kurt Vanhoutte (University of Antwerp).
Based on the circus and fairground collections of Allard Pierson, we are creating a new Tarot card deck. With the Tarot de Marseille as a blueprint, images from the archives (largely from the 19th and early 20th centuries) are edited and transformed into the 78 allegorical cards of the major and minor arcana.
Our method takes its inspiration from Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne from the 1920s.
The reconstructed ‘panels 50, 51 and 47’ from the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg. Photo The Warburg Institute, London
We seek imagery that shows visual, and where possible, content similarities to the Tarot de Marseille, especially the version and interpretation of Chilean, French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin.
Tarot is ancient but reached a peak in the 19th century when the cards acquired symbolic meaning. It is no coincidence that the cards gained a central place at fairs and related popular entertainment venues. We transform parts of images related to or depicting those 19th century funfairs and circuses to form a Tarot deck.
Top: Tarot de Marseille, reconstructed by Philippe Camoin and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Bottom: Tarot des Forains (Funfair Tarot) in progress.
Through collage and digital drawings, new images are created. However, the historical source images remain recognisable to the audience. In other words, the archive remains visible in the new iconography.
Some of the source material was unmistakably suitable and after some adjustments, a new tarot card was fairly quickly created, but most cards came about after a more extensive research.
Reference cards from the Tarot de Marseille: La Force, Strength and Le Monde, the World (Camoin - Jodorowsky)
The card ‘la Force’ Strength depicts a female lion tamer. In the Allard Pierson archives we found an impressive number of images of suitable ‘dompteuses’:
Images from the Allard Pierson Circus and TIN (Theater Instituut Nederland) collections.
For some cards several source images were brought together in a collage. A good example of this is the card 'le Monde' The World, for which many different images (mainly posters from the Friedländer collection), where brought together.
A selection of the images which served as inspiration and building blocks for the Tarot card Le Monde. All images are part of the Allard Pierson Circus and TIN (theatre instituut Nederland) collections (except the two images on the top right).
The different stages of creating a card:
From left to right; the process of creating the Tarot card ‘Le Monde’. Collages of different source images and changing the dimensions of the image.
Left: the final design for the Tarot card ‘Le Monde’. Right: this image is made up of five different source images.
The cards are not finalised yet, but the preliminary design looks as follows:
The preliminary designs for the Tarot cards Empress; Emperor; The Chariot; Justice, Fortitude; XIII (death); The Devil and The World.
Visual artists Roger Cremers and Doina Kraal have been working together as an artist duo since 2022. They share a deep appreciation for stories and objects with a history. Their work reactivates the sensory experience that lies dormant in archives, collections and even old music and translates that experience into contemporary art.