We are inside the Tower at the very moment of its collapse. Walls split open, floors buckle, and the familiar structures that once seemed permanent are suddenly revealed as fragile. There is no safe distance from which to observe the catastrophe: the viewer is placed within it, surrounded by falling stone and fragments of a world coming apart.

The card evokes the profoundly unsettling moment when certainty disappears; when beliefs, identities, relationships or carefully constructed lives can no longer sustain themselves. The Tower is not simply destruction; it is the violent rupture of an illusion of permanence. What collapses is often what we believed we could not live without.

There are no human figures within the Tower. I wanted the viewer to inhabit the card completely: to be alone inside the collapse, not watching someone else’s disaster, but experiencing their own. Yet destruction also contains a strange promise. Once the old structure has fallen, something new can be imagined. Only after disruption can we rebuild. Only when the walls come down can we discover what lies beyond them.

As the Zen poet Ikkyū is often paraphrased: “Now that the roof is burning, I can see the stars.”

The Tower belongs to Andrea Aste’s Tarot of Crossed Destinies, a Tarot deck conceived as a visual journey through the architecture of fate, imagination and human experience. The Deck is inspired by Italo Calvino’s Castello dei Destini Incrociati and conceived as a myriorama: a landscape composed of interchangeable visual fragments, allowing different configurations — and therefore different worlds — to emerge.