Some houses preserve photographs. Others preserve silences. In certain homes, a grandmother knows exactly when the courtyard should not be crossed; someone remembers a promise made before a candle; a door closes without wind and nobody asks why.
The Arcanos of the House begins in that territory—the place where family history, Dominican folklore, and spiritual imagination cease to be separate subjects. It is neither an exotic illustration of the Caribbean nor a mechanical substitution of European names with local characters. It is an artistic investigation into the images through which a culture learns to fear, resist, care, remember, and transform.
The number beneath the mystery
A conventional tarot has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. The minors are arranged in four suits of 14 cards—ten numbered cards and four court cards. This structure was consolidated long after the first tarot decks appeared as trick-taking games in fifteenth-century Italy. Their dominant association with divination and occult practice came centuries later, especially from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onward.
That history matters because it frees tarot from the fiction of purity. Tarot has always traveled. It has been a game, a luxury object, a popular language, an esoteric tool, a graphic artwork, and a device for conversation. Its figures have changed clothing, architecture, race, and landscape whenever artists needed them to answer a different world.
The Arcanos of the House enters that tradition of transformation. The project proposes 22 Dominican major figures and a minor structure inspired by four Caribbean forces: Mountain or Earth, Sea or Water, Wind, and Fire. The working archive currently contains 72 received images, 59 unique compositions, and 13 groups of variants or duplicates. They are not 59 disconnected pictures. They are the first evidence of a system.
Not decorating tarot, but arguing with it
The starting question is not, “Which Dominican character resembles the Hermit?” It is more uncomfortable: “What does solitude mean on an island marked by migration, mountains, occupations, hurricanes, and departures?” From there may emerge the Hermit of Pico Duarte, but also the Ciguapa as impossible orientation, Papá Liborio as faith and resistance, the Bacá as pact and debt, and the Jupías as the persistence of those who no longer possess bodies.
Every figure requires three layers to remain distinct:
- Historical record: dates, documents, identifiable testimony, and political context.
- Oral tradition: changing narratives that belong to no single version or author.
- Artistic interpretation: the meaning the figure acquires within this tarot.
The distinction does not diminish mystery; it deepens it. Knowing that an early printed work titled La Ciguapa appeared in Santo Domingo in 1866 does not destroy the being. It reveals that she has moved in and out of writing for at least a century and a half. Knowing that Olivorio Mateo’s movement began in 1908 and that its leader died in 1922 prevents Papá Liborio from being reduced to fantasy: before he became an arcano, he was a man, healer, leader, and target of persecution.
A house is not a motionless museum
“House” does not describe only a building. It is a technology of memory. What was inherited lives beside what was never explained; Catholic, Indigenous, and African-derived practices share space with yard remedies, photographs of the absent, practical advice, and supernatural warnings.
This tarot therefore refuses a docile, sunlit Caribbean. Its palette holds aged gold, black, smoke, salt, rust, wet earth, and the red of a promise. Beauty remains, but never separated from the price that produced it. The image must seduce before revealing that something is watching from the background.
The project also refuses to treat “Taíno,” “African,” or “peasant” culture as decorative texture. Colonial accounts of Taíno spirituality were written inside conquest and unequal translation. They must be read with their limits exposed. Dominican-Haitian practices cannot be converted into horror props without remembering the border, slavery, racialization, and survival that shaped them.
What does a card do?
A card does not deliver a verdict. It creates friction.
Before the Bacá, the question may be: What prosperity am I willing to pay for, and who carries its cost? Before the Ciguapa: Am I lost, or am I following tracks designed to deceive the hunter? Before Papá Liborio: When does faith become community, and when does power begin to fear it? Before the Jupías: Which dead still organize the life of this house?
The reading occurs in the conversation between image, memory, and present time. Belief in prediction is not required. Yale describes tarot as visual, tactile, conversational, and auditory, as well as a technology for imagining and dismantling social worlds. That comes close to the heart of The Arcanos of the House: the cards do not dictate a Dominican destiny. They open a room that had been locked.
From archive to Turin
Five works—The Bacá, The Ciguapa, Papá Liborio, The Man in the Black Hat, and The White Lady—form the selection prepared for TAROT ART 2026 at Con/Temporary Spaces Santa Teresa in Turin. The collective exhibition runs August 28–September 3, 2026, with the opening on August 29 at 5:30 p.m.
There is a beautiful symmetry here. Tarot emerged as a visual game in fifteenth-century Italy. These Dominican figures now return to Italy as contemporary arcana—not to ask permission of tradition, but to show that tradition remains alive only when it can be inhabited, debated, and transformed.
The Arcanos of the House does not ask whether the Caribbean possesses enough mystery to enter tarot. It asks why it took us so long to recognize that it already had arcana of its own.
Call to action: Follow the series to enter, card by card, the stories of the Bacá, the Ciguapa, Papá Liborio, the Jupías, the Man in the Black Hat, and the White Lady.