🎴 Tarot of Legislative Theater: Reading the System to Rewrite the Future

We didn’t come to ask for permission.
We came to shuffle the system.

Because talking about participation means nothing if we’re still speaking the language of institutions.
Because mental health doesn’t fit in a protocol.
Because some young people know the experience of waiting, collapse, and “come back later” better than any policy brief.
And because every card left unplayed is a story lost.

This is where the Tarot of Legislative Theater begins:
not to predict the future,
but to read the blocks,
activate memory,
and rehearse what might still be possible.

This workshop emerged from the translocal collaboration of Youth Mental Health Beyond Borders, a project grounded in the belief that young people must be at the forefront of reimagining mental health — especially those navigating the intersections of racism, housing precarity, and institutional neglect.

The session brought together youth from Mindset Revolution in Greater Manchester and the Kasal de Roquetes in Barcelona, as part of a broader Legislative Theater process (see full context here). These young people had already co-created a series of powerful policy recommendations through performance and deliberation (see the proposals here). But as often happens, the question remained: What happens after the applause? How do we push for real implementation?

That’s where the Tarot of Legislative Theater came in.

We designed a deck not to predict the future, but to reshape it. Each card was a symbolic tool to navigate the tensions, obstacles, and openings that shape participatory policymaking — particularly around mental health, care, and access. The deck became a way to rehearse confrontation, reveal power, and pressure institutions — using play as a tactical language.

Nadia Nadesan, a member of the Platoniq team facilitated the workshop through a set of poetic prompts she created. These weren’t generic archetypes, but collective figures built from memory, resistance, and lived tension:
– The Tidekeeper, a storyteller who holds the grief of climate collapse;
– The Brick That Speaks, born of tenant assemblies and rent strikes;
– The Interpreter, carrying the emotional labour of migration;
– The Pathfinder, navigating the slow violence of bureaucracy;
– The Gentle Flame, protector of safer spaces and healing.

As we stated at the beginning of the session, this wasn’t a workshop to diagnose or solve individual pain. It was about mapping the forces that shape our shared realities, and giving them names, faces, and voices. We invited participants to co-create a tarot deck for our times:
rooted in collective memory,
speaking to the systems that harm or heal,
and addressed to those who most need to listen — policymakers and power holders.

Tarot, of course, is not neutral. While its popular forms were codified in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, its deeper roots lie elsewhere. The very structure of the deck — with four suits and court cards — can be traced back to Mamluk playing cards from 14th-century Egypt, which travelled to Europe via trade routes through Andalusia and the Mediterranean. These Mamluk cards, featuring suits like swords, cups, and coins, laid the groundwork for European decks, including what later became tarot.

The meanings we now associate with cards like the Fool or the Tower emerged much later, through layers of Christian symbolism, esoteric reinterpretation, and colonial entanglement. In this sense, tarot is already a hybrid technology — a device shaped by cross-cultural circulation and power dynamics. And so, working with tarot today, especially in the context of youth resistance and mental health, invites a question: How can we interpret and integrate the intercultural history of tarot in our social movements?

We think it must be and that starts by flipping its purpose.

Instead of reading for ourselves, we practiced reading for those in power. The workshop became a speculative ritual: What if a group of racialised and precarious young people were invited to read the tarot to the policymakers in charge of implementing their demands? Not to ask them for favours. But to show them the path. To hold them accountable. To speak from the chaos of lived experience with the clarity of symbolic force.

The cards were inspired by the roles in Legislative Theater: the Protagonist (a person experiencing oppression), the Antagonist or Blocker (the structure that sustains harm), the Change-Maker (an actor or action that opens new paths), the Chorus (systemic or collective forces), and the Joker aka the facilitator, who invites the audience to intervene, disrupt the script, and rehearse change.

The simulation centered on one specific recommendation from the policy cycle: the "Council of Accountability and Legacy". A proposal that calls for mental health-safe career services co-designed by young people, and for employers to be held responsible for the wellbeing of those they claim to support. The tarot became a stage to re-enter that demand — not through another PDF, but through vision, conflict, and story.

But tarot also revealed itself as more than a pressure tool. It became a method for inclusion. In Legislative Theater, not everyone can or wants to intervene in a scene. Some youth feel excluded by theatrical or verbal formats. The tarot offered another doorway. A slower one. A symbolic one. A powerful one.

A way to participate without performing.
A way to dissent without shouting.
A way to speak without being spoken over.

It helped us rehearse what it might mean for collective memory — not individual trauma — to become the ground on which policy is shaped.

But for now, we leave you with a question:

What card would your institution draw?
And would it know how to read it?