enough!

52 playing cards for equality!

have you ever wondered why we choose to play a game that supports the notion that men are better than women, that monarchs are more powerful than the collective? I did and then developed a deck to propose a new vocabulary for playing cards. 

let's change the words, lets change the thinking. 

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

Like many of you are feeling, I think there are more important things happening in our world than any notebook will solve.  Children are starving and those in power don’t seem to care, instead they are acting like kings - funding colonisation projects that look a lot like crusades whilst hoarding wealth and increasing taxes. I wonder where they got these notions from?

A while back I asked myself a question about our playing cards, why is the most powerful card a king*? In games played by children and adults alike, why do we endorse the notion that a man beats a woman? That there’s a class of white people that sit above the notion of the collective?

*if you consider the ace most powerful then ask why we endorse the power of the individual over the collective

Rather than complain about this idea, I decided to develop an alternative design and vocabulary that puts democratic values at the heart of the playing card design. The Vote, Court & Senate replace the jack, queen & king putting extra emphasis on the power of the collective. And I’ve made some other minor adjustments too to update the design for a modern democratic world.

I believe that in the long run that we are moving towards a functioning democracy but we must continue to work to progress the power of the collective. Under capitalism we allow inherited wealth to hold too much power as if somehow money, property and gold gives people the divine right to rule, to decide who eats and who starves. I believe this can change.

In therapy we learn new vocabularies to expand our ability to understand our minds, to build better futures for ourselves and let the past go. This deck of cards is inspired by that journey, an attempt to give us new words, new games, new ideas and forge new ways of thinking. I think it is time, the king has lived long enough.