Wild Tarot: Barcelona Poesia 2025

The Wild Tarot adventure is a card and piano presentation performed live by Oriol Sauleda and Lulu Martorell. It is a musical consultancy and sound bite, inspired by the unique character of tarot hands, in the time and place of the cards being pulled and those having them read.

The session, performed out loud, sounds out and does not preach, presenting symbols as the keys to open up the queen’s gardens. Driven by tarot’s Major Arcana, Oriol guides us through a realm that hosts Lulu’s song and melody. It is the result of tarot’s irrational power, its seductive attraction, the immediate poetics it reveals, for in tarot, as in lyrical poetry and the chaotic order of the universe, everything is connected and resonates. This leads to the initial invocation, the “Spiritual Canticle” of Saint John of the Cross, unleashing the sincere, ritual mechanics of Wild Tarot. This exclusive premiere has been prepared for Festival Barcelona Poesia, in the context of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

Oriol Sauleda presents his poetry like a minstrel, with the charm of a griot who needs sonnets to make himself heard. He insists on poetic play, in momentary chance and improvising in order to be on time. Every so often he publishes a book. Sauleda adds fuel to the fire with words from theatre, rock music, tarot and the Immaculate Conception, ready for the cold. He does not do this alone, but rather needs powerful allies like Lulu herself, along with Núria Martínez Vernis, Memi March, Amor Estadella, Montse Colomé and other great women. The improvisation sessions done with Lulu Martorell are called Concepcionals. More recently, in collaboration with Marcel·lí Bayer, they have activated memory and recollection in the show Adamar Johnson, reviving a totally unknown poet who died during the AIDS epidemic.

Lulu Martorell is just as she was in 1984, when she presented the TV music programme ‘Pleitaguensam’, or the mythic, unclassifiable ‘Glasnost’: leather jacket, wavy hair and a punky voice that speaks whatever comes to mind. Younger generations do not know enough about what she contributed through her programmes. Singing, playing music, writing or making movies, surrounded by her friends—that is the air she breathes. Oriol Martorell, Carlos Santos, Agustí Fernández, Pepe Sales, Albert Pla and Africa have all been her guides. Now, holding tight to Oriol Sauleda and the musical project Concepcionals, they swim against the current of the Llobregat River until finally getting to the Konvent art centre, near the headwaters, where everything comes together.