SYSTEM IN CRISIS
[deck of cards, 2016-ongoing]
SYSTEM IN CRISIS is a tarot deck adaptation by the artist and writer Anna Zett. It is the result of a translation process born out of the artists desire to make their personal and ancestral entanglement with the ruined cosmology of modernity tangible in a dialogical setting. Each card holds an ambivalent meaning, so, whether one trusts or critiques modern values, the deck may be used to reflect how one orients within this cosmology – politically, emotionally, aesthetically, existentially. Anna Zett is a Berlin-based artist and the particular historical frame work for this modernist adaptation is the Weimar Republic.
Similar to regular tarot decks SYSTEM IN CRISIS devises an enchanted holistic system, a phantasy of symbolic order and linear progress, distributed onto 78 cards: 22 trump cards and 56 color cards. In each reading, the shuffling and random recombination of cards allows for new associations, projections, and interpretations to arise. Informed by historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist anthropology, SYSTEM IN CRISIS transposes the late-medieval symbolism of traditional tarot cards into a more recent era of social upheaval: classical modernism, within the regional variant known as the Weimar Republic. A phase of radical innovation in art, science, and social structure, it has become a kind of mythical era, particularly in Berlin. At that time our current post-religious liberal cosmology took its first concrete shape – before fascism reacted with brutal destruction. By now, modernity has been called out as an imperial project, conflated with capitalism, and declared dead, yet the secular global orientation it promised remains effective until today.
Every card functions as a node in a network of typical 1920’s issues, such as physical exercise, enchanted science, economic instability, expressionist art, analytical psychology, automated production, and political manipulation. Many of the deck’s characters are taken from German silent films, in particular the paradoxical films of Fritz Lang. Others depict historical figures like the boxer Johann “Rukeli” Trollmann or the performer Valeska Gert. Rather than occultism, the deck’s cosmology is anchored in revolutionary promises of disruption and renewal, in individual dreams of self-expression, in rebellious visions of meaninglessness. The deck was created in response to a deepening systemic crisis of democracy in Europe and the US as a tool for vocal group improvisation. It intends to actualize our understanding of historical modernism as an ambiguous image (Kippfigur) and invites to think about one’s own psychic entanglement in a progressive mythology at once emancipatory and destructive.
Since April 2026 the deck is being released card by card in a print edition of 50.
Initially the deck was developed to be used instead of a script in an experimental radio drama: Industry and Fortune. My voice, lost in a holistic system / Industry and Fortune. My voice, lost in a holistic system (Bayrischer Rundfunk, 2017)
Performative card reading before the deck’s publication:
Artists Space, New York (2017), Café Odradek, Chemnitz (2018), Center for Literature/Burg Hülsoff (2019), Der Ohrenmensch, HKW, Berlin (2019), Fortuna, Berlin (2023), Literarischer Herbst, Leipzig (2024) among others.
Texts:
Die Sachlichkeit, In: WORD.-Magazine #5: Dark Magic, 2021
Odradeck, In: Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, ed. by Jamie Sutcliffe, 2021
Die Gestalt und die Sachlichkeit, In: &SHY Magazine, 2022