Cat Suit (Minor Arcana)

In times of trouble, we turn to the cards. We parse the obscure images and occult placements, using divination as a practice of creative anxiety-management. The 78 cards of the Tarot offer a symbolic iconography, structured by chance operations, through which to interpret our circumstances—and perhaps, glimpse the future. The algorithm of the Tarot favors relevance. These things will happen. Every symbol is open enough to contain all of life’s possibilities: love, catastrophe, hope, loss. And every card contains positive, negative, ambivalent, and ambiguous valences. The reader pulls from a narrow array. They perform a search, of sorts: asking a question, they pull a card, or pulling a card, they ask what questions the card seems to answer. The Tarot is programmed to function whether one card is pulled and interpreted alone, or read in a spread of multiple cards interpreted in a syntactical relation to one another.

The numerological system presents a somewhat arbitrary conceptual relation between numbers and concepts suggested by them: even numbers suggest stability, possibly stagnation, and odd numbers offer new potentials and crises. It is in the intersection of the number and the suit (traditionally wands, swords, cups and coins) that a kind of meaning can be created—but that, too, is always dependent on placement, and proximity, to other cards.

Artist-mystics Nikki de Sainte-Phalle, Leonora Carrington, and Alejandro Jodorowsky each created their own decks, often focusing on the 22 “trumps,” or Major Arcana, the main characters. But what about the other 56 cards that make up most of the deck, and most of our lives? What you see here is the first iteration of a new deck I am in the process of designing as a project by the art collective, My Barbarian (a collaboration between myself and Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon), that will include performances inspired by interpretations of these cards. The deck may take a lifetime to complete: we have chosen to focus on developing one suit of minor arcana first, a suit of cats. Tarot and cats go hand-in-paw. Exceedingly meme-able, cats, like Tarot cards, communicate what we project onto them. We’re inspired by the feline as both the magical familiar we’ve all desired, and the ubiquitous protagonist of an online space we can’t escape. Like the cats on the internet, we are shaped by unfettered mediation, environmental degradation, economic precarity, and cultural decay. Cats, as a companion species to humans, are dependent on the flawed structures humans built (including pet ownership) and yet they appear independent, even unbothered. Our “Cat Suit” offers a cast of anthropomorphized cat alter-egos in all their erotic, mysterious, violent and hilarious splendor.

All images designed by and courtesy of the author.

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  Alexandro Segade

  Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group. Segade’s graphic novel The Context, published in May 2020 by Primary Information His performance and video work with collective My Barbarian received a 20-year survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and was later acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Recent film projects include Star Choir (2024), a science fiction opera shot at Mount Wilson Observatory, LA, and Anoche, which premiered at the 2025 Havana Biennial, Cuba. Segade is associate professor in Visual Arts At UCSD.