Styx: A Gitane Queer’s Life in Black and White

Following their January exhibition at Grands Carmes, Styx (they/them/it), the artist behind The Stronza Tarot, reflects on craft, tarot, and resistance from a queer Romani perspective that undermines whiteness and spiritual aesthetics.

Much of your work is hand made — thinking of your linocuts, paintings, and notebooks on display — what distinctions do you make (if any) between analog and digital as an artist working across reproducible media?

As a person with a disability (chronic migraine), I do a lot of my ideation on my iPad from bed during attacks. Still, I no longer sell digitally printed drawings (except for zines), because I felt I was losing a connection to the handmade aspect. That doesn’t mean digital isn’t a valuable tool — especially for screen printing or animation. What I find truly interesting about engraving and screen printing are the errors, the small imperfections, and the time it takes to print. A single impression of an A2 engraving takes me about forty minutes — not counting the hours needed to carve the matrix.

How does the internet play into your vision of self-publishing in terms of distribution?

The internet, especially Instagram, is unfortunately my most effective communication tool. I’m thinking about other ways to do it, but my disability doesn’t allow me to run around to bookstores to drop off my publications.

What space do you see zines occupying in the field of publishing, now that the context has changed in terms of saturation?

I think zines will always have their reason to exist. For many makers, there’s also the hope that it might lead to official publication and thus a form of stability. I want zines to be accessible, which is why I print many myself, and in black-and-white.

For me, my zines are chapters of my life — experiments, sometimes printed via engraving or hand-screen printing.

How long have you been practicing tarot? How did you get started reading cards?

I’ve practiced tarot as far back as I can remember. But it was five years ago that I really got serious about it again.

What traditions do you adhere to? Are there any that you completely disregard?

I mostly stick to classical traditions — cross spreads — and remain purely historical. For centuries, Gitane women could only be card readers or sex workers; today, I am both. I stay away from “white” teachings, but also from contemporary ‘boho’ tarot decks that focus only on the 22 Major Arcana, while completely ignoring the rest of the deck. Have I really made the effort to understand the cards? Religiously, I am Orthodox, but since the Church strongly criticizes readings, I keep away from its influence — and return to the cards themselves.

You developed an entirely new, 78 card tarot deck titled The Stronza Tarot, and described the deck as focusing on “butch/fem experiences, lesbianism in general, sex work, and gender transition.” Can you talk a bit about how this project started? What about the name of the deck?

I started this tarot in 2020 during a family rupture as an attempt to reconnect with my mother. I studied every card in every deck I owned. I filled notebooks with notes and sketches until I realized that to reconnect. I had to use all my knowledge so that each card represented both its traditional meaning and a part of my life — as a way to tell my story, my lesbianism, my gender, after years of silence. It took me two years to find that balance.

The title is simple: My father is Italian, and violent. As a child, he called me “stronza” — which can be translated to English as “bitch”, “whore”, “slut”… depending on context. Reclaiming those insults as words of pride is of great importance.

Your deck is in black-and-white. Can you discuss this choice? Is there any relationship to some of the historical examples of uncut sheets whose production was interrupted?

For context: There are a few famous uncut sheets of printed cards, such as the 15th c. Florentine Rothschild sheets in the Louvre’s collection. These were likely intended to be painted before distribution.As a practitioner, is there something that you have found lacking in historical decks?

The deck is in black-and-white so I don’t get lost in an aesthetic that forgets the meaning of the card. It’s simplicity forces me to keep a clear, simple meaning in mind. Later, I worked on color versions for illustrations, but in tarot, color matters, and I didn’t want to forget that. Sometimes I think about making a color version again, but I think that would take years of work.

You've described some of your work as situated within the horror genre. Can you talk a bit about how you understand these pieces, and the genre as a whole, to relate to gender? One example is your printed work on display at Grands Carmes, which depicts a silhouette of one of the aliens from the “Aliens” film series. The piece reads: “God needs more transexuals. Don’t die wondering,” with “Xenogender” written overtop of the silhouette. Regarding this piece, what is the significance of the shift from traditional horror motifs (bats, witches, werewolves) to science fiction (aliens)?

I grew up with horror — Frankenstein, Alien, and Dracula flooded the DVD and bookshelves. Our cat was named Akasha, a major vampire figure from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. People often think only of Interview with the Vampire, but her universe is richer — and her daughter’s death plays a big role.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë was, for me, the most beautiful representation of zigeuner culture for a long time. White people seized the tarot, our stories, our aesthetics, to create the gothic movement — whiter than white. Today, in horror, we are fetishized or erased,and I can’t stand it. Carmilla wasn’t white, Heathcliff was zigeuner, vampires are regularly racialized, as are zombies. I get a bit lost because I work on this, to the great displeasure of some. I reclaim the gothic and horror movements in all their forms, out of exhaustion with whiteness.

As for the alien — I’m working on the evolution of representations (zombies are a perfect example — you find them everywhere) to connect them to science-fiction horror — perhaps thanks to Doctor Who and its mutant space vampires. Doctor Who was long my best representation of non-white and queer characters in “horrific” contexts.

In the popular view of practitioners such as Aleister Crowley, and other especially English occultists working with the Tarot, there is an aesthetical connection to horror imagery, and a practical connection to sex magic. As someone who deploys horror imagery in service of cartomancy as well as to address the erotic, and additionally sex work, How does your practice handle these types of connotations (from Crowley et al.) from a queer Gitane perspective?

I didn’t take them into account in the first phase of my deconstruction of the cards — but I studied dozens of tarot decks to understand their visions and mine. Crowley’s deck, in particular, is a wonderful work where each card was studied and worked on. It’s a sadness I can’t speak to him face to face and understand the challenges he faced. Unfortunately, very few people know his work. But I think tarot has a link with horror and eroticism. The most asked questions are always about love and sex, or about situations that scare the querent. The cards have imposing names, or hard symbols, (the Ten of Swords represents a person pierced from all sides, Death, The Hanged Man, The Tower on fire).

I’ve also noticed in the past two years a lot of horror productions — series and films — have been using tarot. I haven’t had the courage to watch them, because I don’t want tarot to be seen as a curse or as a symbol of horror. It’s only a tool for divination and self-understanding, like so many others.

What about the present day? It is often stated that we are living in the sci-fi dystopia envisioned by 20th century writers. What do we do, and what is the role of the cards in our contemporary context?

I disagree, I think we’d want to live in a sci-fi dystopia, because then we’d have the cards (lol) to get out of it.

I’m a huge fan of 1960s–80s sci-fi — Asimov is next to my bed, the Robot Cycle books piled high, threatening to collapse. I’ve read Foundation, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 — and more recently Silo, by Hugh Howey, which I strongly recommend you read.

But as a queer Gitane, I only see the rise of fascism, a step backward, maybe a new Cold War. I’d rather see it as a sci-fi dystopia — then I’d know what to do.

What we must do is act beyond protesting. The police recently beat me up — I thought I was going to die. I was sleeping in my own home. They filed a complaint against me for assault over a spit — while I’m the one who ended up traumatized in bed.

The Palace of Justice is unused, there’s a monument to Leopold II: It’s a shame. For me, we must tear down the Palace of Justice, reclaim the 300 million Euro budget spent on scaffolding, pay reparations to Congo, reinvest the rest in social aid, and reform prisons to eventually abolish them.

Protests are no longer enough — we just shout, surrounded by cops on government-approved routes. We must remove politicians from Pride — their budget must go to shelters for marginalized youth. We must support the TSFB (Trans Solidarity Fund). Organizations must stop getting lost in endless discussions and act — even if it’s not perfect. I’ve already ended up homeless, but a couch in a squat is better than a bench outside.

In Brussels, dozens of buildings are abandoned. Give them to me, I’ll renovate them and turn them into shelters.

The role of the cards? Take the time to receive your flaws — to become better.

“Gitane” — a self-identified term used by the artist to name their Romani heritage.

Interview: Expo Working Group - Images: Katrien Schuermans