Mad People Tarot Decks

We are all mad here

In Lewis Carroll's iconic novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, the eponymous young protagonist sneaks into and makes her way through a fantasy world populated with hybrid creatures, walking and talking chess pawns and playing cards following mathematically structured moves. Whether a piece of concealed social and political satire, a surreal coming-of-age allegory or simply a game of words, notions and numbers narrated in fairy tale form, Carroll's universe remains one of literature's richest, most fascinating puzzles. Nightmarishly sophisticated in its understated wittiness, it brings forth the dramatic contradictions in human society's extreme organization, the inherent "madness" governing virtually every aspect of our everyday life and interaction.

Loosely drawing inspiration from the books' gorgeous illustrations by Tenniel and Rackham (among the numerous artists who have fulfilled the task in the course of one and a half centuries, since Alice's first publication in 1865), Demo Fusion & EBM's Mad People & Mad People in a Glass Tarot decks (February-April 2020) explore the theme of the absurd in bold visual concepts, centered around archetypal dipoles like birth and death, struggle and peace, choices and fate, light and darkness, beautiful monsters and monstrous beauties.

The traditional Major Arcana figures are reinvented in a modern, often subversive manner, their symbolisms re(en)coded and expanded into a philosophical, sometimes humorous, macabre or even deliberately grotesque view of the standard Tarot emblems and connotations.

In the Mad People card sets, each trump is represented by a fictional character from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass - though not always strictly corresponding to their original attributes. The Mad People in a Glass set is inverted not only in terms of color/lighting, but also of image orientation, reflecting the reversed order and movement of the elements, as brilliantly described in Through the Looking-Glass.