Elisa Carricajo could be one of the petals of “La flor” directed by Mario Llinás and also a neighbor who plays absurdity in “30 nights with my ex”, directed by Adrián Suar. He is capable of becoming the EL of “Lava skin”an emblematic theater group that owes its magical name to the initials of its members, Pilar Gamboa, Elisa herself, Laura Paredes and Valeria Correa and also getting on the canoe to row a cultural center as unique as Planta Inclán. Playwright, director, Mar del Plata explorer, Wonder Woman, has just polished and waxed with as much mastery as the “Karate Kid” a surprising book called “This is also tarot”. A rare mix of personal deck, free association and Argentine existential pop, the oracle we didn’t know we needed.
News: How did it occur to you to write a book that intertwines tarot, fiction and pop culture?
Elisa Carricajo: The idea for the book was born as a study method, although perhaps it all started when they gave me a deck. I had already been studying different things linked to the stars, spirituality and the esoteric, to what is beyond. At one point I was very interested in astrology, but I could never handle it, it is a discipline that opens up and displays too many categories, as I am very mental, I felt like I was going to go crazy if I got fully into it. But the tarot caught me from the narrative point of view, it is as if it told you a story and it has different categories that you mix. There are the 22 major arcana, which are like a little story, and then the 56 minor arcana that operate as if they were Spanish decks. At first I studied the major arcana, I more or less understood them and then when I started with the minor arcana, it was a mess! Every time I made a roll, I had to go look at the notes, I couldn’t remember everything. So I said, I’m going to start writing as if I were creating my own deck, linking images with texts because I’m a cheese at drawing. I verified it when I signed up for a deck design course, my classmates came with some impressive drawings and I doodled with three sticks and a head (laughs).
News: There are tarot decks with different themes, right?
Carricajo: Yes, with all the ones you can think of! For example, there is a “Twin Peaks” deck. So, The Popess, which is figure two of the tarot, a woman who is silent, who does not speak, but has the book of the wisdom of the world, in that deck is represented by “the lady of the log” from “Twin Peaks”, a perfect analogy. There are decks of “Sailor Moon”, Marvel, plastic artists, musicians, movies and series, you can find what you are looking for. My book in that sense is like a kind of deck where I link each figure to different stories and emblematic characters that went through our lives. Each story is linked to a popular image, to cultural symbols that were recorded in our minds and that are horizontal, recognizable, and available to be read from different perspectives.
News: On the cover of “This is also Tarot” Wonder Woman, Carlos Gardel, Kung-Fu Panda, David Bowie, Asterix and many more coexist harmoniously drawn, under the title Manual / Esoteric Pop Fiction. How did you combine that pop iconography with some more personal stories?
Carricajo: All of them are mixed in my own tarot, they are filtered into different stories that arise from a conversation with my parents or my daughter, and also in a film, a song or a book that are part of me. The philosopher Jacques Rancière says in his essay “The Ignorant Teacher” that we always learn about something we already know. Then I said: “I’m going to search what I know for the roadmap to understand this tarot thing that seems so difficult to me.” I studied Communication Sciences at the UBA, I have a habit of studying, of searching, I have been curious all my life, but I feel that for people who did not have religious training, there is something about spiritual or sacred languages that is complicated for us. It’s a bit like learning another language and you have to find your way to translate it. What better way to remember something new than by sticking it to a movie that moved me? For example, for me the 5 of swords is “The Sound of Music.” This card represents sterile battles and poor Julie Andrews is in that convent fighting a completely sterile battle because in reality she wants to do something else. The talents he has do not serve him there, he is in a place that is not the right one. With that reference I didn’t forget that explanation anymore, I now know what the 5 of swords is. I see the figure and think: “We have to choose the battles, the rebellious novice doesn’t want to be a nun, she wants to sing and make clothes with curtains” (laughs).
News: Our great emotional reference was the cinema, what other oracles will the youngest ones have?
Carricajo: I think there is a generational issue there and I don’t know what it will be like in the future, maybe in a few years everyone will be formatted by Big Brother (Laughs) It seems to me that our sentimental education was more in movies than anything else, that greatly shaped our ability to think and the way we approach the world. Yes, it is true that pop is more present than ever, young people long for something that happened before they were born, my daughter tells me: “That is very 80’s or very 2000’s”, she mentions it as something good, as something nice, what is nostalgic for her is a remote past that she never experienced… because she is eight years old. But there are series and music that refer to those imaginaries, there is a feeling that the system seems to continue reproducing something that was invented at another time. The K-Pop phenomenon, for example, is something original from this time, but here there are national K-Pop groups that are similar to the Bandana or some boy bands from decades ago, you see them and if you get a little distracted it is half the same. Today there is so much transformation, a lot of means and tools, but paradoxically, there is some aesthetic innovation that is a little hindered. It seems to be spinning around itself, prey to repetition, it is not creating new things, it seems to me that nostalgia has a little to do with that.
News: I was thinking about “Fight Club” and the famous phrase “Everything is a copy of a copy of another copy.” Being an actress, playwright and cultural manager, do you think we are experiencing that a bit?
Carricajo: Yes, sometimes I put it in perspective and wonder how a person who lived his youth in the 70s sees the world compared to 2020, because the amount of things that happened is impressive, technological innovation is fierce. But now we are in 2026 and I feel that despite everything, the technological revolution is just that, it is not such a creative revolution in human terms. It is based a lot on repetition, on a system by which you are bombarded with images all the time, but it draws on other things already done and not so much on creativity. What AI does is combine what already exists, it doesn’t invent, compile and mix, so I think we are hitting that limit. We went from a first fascination where some came to think: “All the scripts are going to be written in ChatGPT”, to realizing that evidently something human is lost. The tarot speaks that we should be able to reach true creation, a combination of the elements that we have at our disposal to invent something completely different. That is culture, recombining what we know to create the new, almost in the divine sense, but bringing it down to earth. And AI cannot do that.
News: On the one hand there is a discourse of saving technology, but there are also many people disappointed because a robot vacuum cleaner did not solve their lives and they fall into a very strange spiritual fallacy. Do you see that phenomenon?
Carricajo: Yes, obviously there is the spiritual falopa, but at one point I think it is like an expected response to a world so governed by money, objects, dehumanization, where the feeling of success is associated with immediacy and monetization. Many people wonder how far and why. For me, everything about spiritual phallopa arises from a genuine need of people and meets a market that has a way of responding to that. But what do I know, a woman goes there for three days to one of those meetings where they take tapas on the forehead and the mine. After leaving the house, the kids and her husband for a while, she more or less breathed and came back better (laughs).
News: A native popera tarot doubt. Is the most Argentine card the 9 of Gold because it has a name like a fat cake?
Carricajo: Oh, I had never thought about the biscuits and the 9 d’or, that’s a good one! (Laughs) Look, I think an Argentine card could be the 7 of gold because it reflects someone who has everything, but can’t see it. It expresses a feeling of not holding on to what there is, because the basis is there but things have to be recognized and accepted, nuclearized and waited, to ensure that anxiety does not kill us.
