Tamara Walcott Singh

Fortune’s Flowers, or Fragments d’un discours amoureux

2018

Fortune’s Flowers, or Fragments d’un discours amoureux, is an invitation to play with chance.

Three leaves of paper with different textures were torn into fragments. Each fragment is hand inscribed with a few words, repeated ad nauseam replicating the ancient and originally French game of love, “effeuiller la marguerite.” For ages, women have played interrogating the divine wisdom of Fortuna, and Nature, embedded in the distribution of petals, asking if a beloved “Loves me or Loves me not.” But, since love is non-binary, the French game offers a total of six possibilities: “M’aime, m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout.” Handwritten instructions have been added to the back of the box and a suggested bibliographic reference is found inside the box.