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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
THE FOOL, THE DAWN & THE STARS


By DANNIEL TOSTES


As we walked along the bodies of water that surrounded us in the night, a teardrop fell from the sky. We halted for a moment and observed the landscape of this Salty planet1 Suddenly, a many-faced and long-haired entity2 appeared out of the obscurity before us. The tips of its hair brushed the still water, creating small waves that soon became strong currents. As the Summer Solstice approached, the sky transformed into a mesmerising dance of colours-hues of grey and cerulean melting into one another. The very first ray of sunlight gently illuminated a winged entity3 of a being that had just crossed the horizon, revealing the purple veins within. Further away, a tornado appeared, flew over the mountains, and deposited a closet4 that must have come from another world. A small breeze caressed our skin and brought us the scent of salt from the endless expanse of shimmering water, where the reflections of stars seemed to dance slowly across the surface creating a choreography5. Mountains subtly shifted their positions, making way for the rising sun, while flowers of every conceivable colour and shape bloomed suddenly, as if celebrating the arrival of a new day. The tapestry of fluidity and change reflected the queer essence of its inhabitants. This ever-changing world, constantly shape-shifting and evolving, was a fitting backdrop for the conversation that unfolded between the Dawn, the Stars, and the Fool6.

The Dawn    There’s several reasons for us to create and be part of a collective. I mean, I think for all of us, the collective was always important, since we got out of the closet, in so many different ways. I think we need to understand the decision to not be alone and how it helps us and our community. Being together gives us a sense of belonging and also protection. It’s important to think of possibilities to work in a collective, it brings another perspective to the work. 

Being a collective, I think it’s a process of talking and listening, and how it helps our mental health. Being in a collective is about taking care. How does it works for the Stars to work together as a collective?


The Stars   Yeah, well, we’re friends first, so there’s this obvious kind of bleeding in that is always very present in our art world, but somehow the personal relationship or the connection comes first for us, and we feel like the work is kind of born out of that, because we were dancing together for other people’s projects, and every time we’re just kind of put in the same room, cause we already had that duet incarnation in some way.

Then we started exchanging, and it was kind of a free flow of conversations around... Firstly, where we are personally, how we make sense of ourselves and the confusion that we feel, you know, encountering our own gender or any gender incarnation, and how difficult that might be. Somehow, we were talking about this idea of a project for one of us actually. And then the duet completely hijacked it. 

That’s how it happened. I just remembered that we had this idea of a solo with an astronaut and then we felt that what it was really talking about was our current experience with gender. Like, I’m actually the astronaut ! And then we started talking about exoplanets, and then it was exciting enough for both of us that we were really hooked. You know, you get hooked to your own premise in a sense. Like, Oh we really want to see what happens next. That’s how it became the duet. Now I remember ! Okay... What is really interesting is that sometimes friendship can be hard to work with, especially in art practices. But this connection that we have allows us to be more vulnerable in the work. And it helps us to connect even more to each other. Because we feel really safe. And sometimes or most of the time, there is a lot going on and we dig deeper and deeper into our own shit, and unfold a lot of personal things. But, yeah, there is this hard-to-explain link that we built over time. Also with this work, we have to open ourselves to each other. This creates a bond that is really strong for the best and for the worst. So really, it’s transcending. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s true. We became a community by experiencing our own vulnerability together, through being scared and excited together. There was this door that opened. 

It’s like having an ongoing practice of what it is to form a queer kinship. This relationship that is very multilayered and has a lot of possibilities. But there’s no defined boundaries in that sense. If we think about it alongside the invitation of the Fool, there is this quality of the river  that comes to mind, you know, of water that flows and has a direction, but there’s also currents that you can’t really anticipate and that you have to adjust to all the time. We feel like that’s the nature of our relationship somehow. The commitment to the work was always about unravelling something in ourselves that maybe we didn’t feel we could do without the other, that we needed that each  other to open up ourselves more, break the shell. So it’s our own therapy moment in a way and it’s also very auto-fictional. That’s what’s at the core of the work rather than creating a piece.


The Dawn   I love that you share the experience that you’re having and relate it with the water. This makes me wonder how we can get inspiration and connections with the water? By the movement and the transitions of water in the idea to see and feel it in different shapes all the time, maybe. It’s important to imagine the connection between the bodies and nature. It’s important to see the presence of water on different scales, in and outside our bodies. This reflection is inspired by the book Bodies of Water by Estrida Neimanis that develops a mode of post human feminist phenomenology that understands the body as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not to separate from our privilege to it. So basically she was talking about how water is an element that more than any other ties human beings into the world around them. And also like these movements of water that come from the river to the oceans that will become clouds, clouds from different shapes, colours that also become liquid again, when it becomes rain.

Water is present in the human body. More than 60 percent of our body is composed of water that is constantly in movement and transition. So I was trying to imagine this relationship with the different shapes of water that’s constantly in movements in nature and in the body. Everybody feels in a unique way the shapes of water and I would like to know what’s your relation to water and how does it impact your cycle?


The Fool   Well, I think I would start by saying that my sun is in Cancer. And this is something that maybe has an impact on why I love water so much. You know, water, I was also just thinking at the moment that, also because I was thinking about the river, that it actually is something that is constantly changing and moving… And is actually quite dissident in itself. There is also something about not following one path, but constantly changing path and evolving, getting bigger and then getting smaller. I think that I love the river and that I can really also connect it somehow with queer philosophies. But yeah my relationship to water, I think for me, it’s also something that I very instinctively connected with somehow, the birth or something that represents fertility. Also because plants need water to grow, you need to drink water to live and everything that is “alive” somehow contains water. So, it’s something that connects all different beings together and that connects every element together. There’s something very spiritual somehow in this idea of cycles.

There was also another element that’s really important, and it’s the topic of fluidity or fluids. Specifically the body fluids and how it’s perceived in society. Quite often they are repressed if we think about saliva, sweat, piss, blood… There’s a taboo with body fluids, that I kind of… I don’t know... I was also really interested in the figure of gargoyles and I was imagining those gargoyles trying desperately to shout, but only saliva would come out of their mouth. I also have this whole thing about fluidity in general, about things that can change and, or shapeshift constantly. And then again, it’s like all those things that I kind of connect with queer identities, but also life in general.


The Stars   Can we share something? It’s quite interesting what you say about the fluids in the body as repressed, because we feel like that’s where our collective work connects, we were kind of somehow threading with that same thread. You know, the tears being saliva being also sweat and how to really make sense of this emotional presence. Every Tuesday we’re part of a friend’s research and we’re doing this somatic exploration of the lymphatic system. We were talking afterwards with my friend about how the lymphatic system is moving the waters in your body and how the water is like, um, an emotional kind of body or a carrier of emotion. And we think the whole reality of those repressed fluids comes with this reality of the repression of a certain emotionality in a sense. And how like, you know, there is this movement to reclaim as you kind of try to review or show these fluids is also a way to kind of release some emotions or expose your emotional reality to the world.


The Fool   I think, um, what we liked with the topic of water is that, somehow, it’s really connected with the topic of emotions and the idea of cycles. And, yeah, both really are elements that you can find in Tarot. I mean, water is really present throughout the Tarot and represents emotions. But also, the Tarot is sometimes called the fool’s journey because it actually starts with this card. I mean, it doesn’t have a number because it actually is the very first and the very last card. Also you can recognise the fool figure in the death arcana which is right in the middle of the deck. Yeah, like um, the idea is that after the last arcana “the world” the journey starts again. 


The Dawn   The Tarot created in this project brings topics such as queerness and gender, that add several layers to this universe and it’s interesting because you add an extra layer of intimacy in the cards.

Even more, the cards became a tool for social and political critiques. The Tarot becomes a tool for informing and inspiring other people in the community. How did the idea to create a new Tarot start, and what’s the importance of building a new interpretation for the cards?


The Fool   Well, I don’t really know. I mean, yes, I know how it started, but it feels a bit like the Tarot appeared in the process of this exhibition really naturally. It was like the water. Like it was just an evidence to work with it because Tarot is something that we share in the collective. Not all of us, but this is a tool that we, some of us, use daily. 

And it’s interesting. I feel like there is a fascination about Tarot in the queer community. I was wondering why. And the beginning of the process was to realise that in many of the archetypes, there is definitely a queerness. And just to use the first example, and which, with the one, everything started is the Fool. Because in my friend’s practice, she’s working with this archetype. That is, I mean, they will, they could explain it better, but, with my words, it’s because the fool is representing a form of marginality.

It was really interesting to just see how in all the Tarot cards you can see queerness. But, at the same time, tarot is also really binary in the sense that there is the Pope and the Papess and, l’Empereur et L’Impératrice…

And it was just like, okay, we use this tool every day, we like it, but how can we make it queer? How can we transcend this queerness that is already existing? And also it got really interesting when we decided to work on it. We realised that the tarot that we were using was created by Pamela Coleman Smith, who is a queer figure. It’s also really interesting because she got erased from the history of this tarot because it’s a man that commissioned her to draw the cards and nobody knows that it’s her that did it. Even though it’s like the most famous tarot in the world, like everybody’s using it. So we’re like, ok, it makes even more sense to, to use her deck and to just go a little further of what she did.

I’m taking pictures of the five Kimera artists presenting in June. For example, um, there are many angels and many chimeras. Angels are a figure that I’m trying to work on in my practice because they represent beings beyond the gender binary. It was just really fluid to decide who’s gonna be which archetype in the tarot. And, um, also, yeah, the water is always there. Like this entity, this queer entity that is, that we don’t name, that we don’t, we just see sometimes. And in the tarot, water is always present. And at the same time, also in the process of this exhibition.

The starting point is queerness, but the more we go in the project, the less we talk about queerness. Queerness is just here and present, and it’s there. as an invisible entity. And I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m clear in this. I don’t know if you all feel the same. But yeah, we just don’t have to talk about queerness anymore. It’s just so, so present that, um, that, that’s it. Yeah, it wasn’t clear, but yeah.


The Dawn   We have less than one minute… 
Should we move to another world?


The Fool   Yeah, yeah, yeah… oh, yes!


The Stars   See you there.


1 Salty Planet, Yel K. Banto
2 La Polyphonie de l’Être, Camille Bellmas
3 Devenir une Oiselle, Hsuan Lee
4 Dorothy’s Closet, Vincent Grange
5 surely no other drifting will ever taste the  same sweat, Lara Chanel & Juliette Yasmine Mello
6 Le tarot des Chimères, Tristan Bartolini

This text was inspired by a conversation through a video call on zoom organised by Danniel Tostes with Juliette Yasmine Mello, Lara Chanel, Tristan Bartolini and Yel K. Banto.