Introduction

What happens when a collective symbolic repertoire meets an individual story?

Tarot is a collection of images with almost 600 years of documented history, although no records confirm exactly where that history began. Over time, this repertoire acquired different meanings and uses, including its association with divination and occultism, so present in the contemporary imagination. In this exhibition, Tarot is understood from a Jungian perspective: as a collection of archetypal images capable of evoking contents of the unconscious and offering a symbolic language through which to perceive movements of psychic life.

It was through Jungian psychotherapy and art therapy that Vivian turned her attention towards her own inner world and the images emerging from her unconscious. Along this path, dance became a way of experiencing, through the body, contents that had not yet found words. Each lived movement expresses a state of consciousness that later takes shape in images, symbols and language through painting.

It is in the relationship between body, image and experience that Tarot emerges for the artist as a powerful symbolic repertoire. Since 2023, Vivian has been investigating its symbolism and iconography in dialogue with different visual traditions and with artists such as Frieda Harris, Pamela Colman Smith, Xul Solar, Niki de Saint Phalle, Rodrigo de Haro and Bonifacio Bembo. Her background in Languages and Literature also relates to this research, particularly through her interest in different forms of language and the layers of meaning in words and images. The first concepts and sketches for the series were developed during her travels between Brazil, Switzerland and Italy.

As she approaches the Arcana, Vivian recognises in their images psychic movements present in her own journey. The states of consciousness experienced in dance find in the Major Arcana images capable of receiving and transforming them. Each work is born from this encounter between the artist’s singular experience and the collective dimension of the Arcana: an alchemy of movement, experience and consciousness that manifests itself in colour, matter, symbol and image. The works express Vivian’s relationship with each Arcanum. When they meet the gaze of those who contemplate them, they can awaken associations, memories, feelings of strangeness and questions that were not anticipated at their origin. The symbol continues its living journey and, with each encounter, can produce a new movement.