2025
CARMEN B. MIKELARENA
BAR 2025 #12
The forest of magical thinking.
How to build a witch
CARMEN B. MIKELARENA
In this edition, the jury composed of Eider Rodriguez (writer), Oskia Ugarte (Director of the HUARTE Art Centre) and Bitamine has selected Carmen B. Mikelarena's (Madrid, Spain) project to be part of the BAR 2025 programme.
In the forests and mountains bordering the Bidasoa, memory is hidden among stories passed down from generation to generation. Where lamias combed their hair with golden combs and Mari linked the earth to the rhythms of nature, fear was also woven. That fear was codified, manipulated and directed against women. The witch hunts in Euskal Herria – with episodes as atrocious as those in Zugarramurdi – were not an isolated frenzy, but a sophisticated device of social control that sought to discipline women's bodies, knowledge and freedoms.
Being a witch often meant being a woman who did not conform to the norm: a healer, a midwife, a widow, a loner, a woman who possessed knowledge that escaped male authority. On the threshold between myth and heresy, between oral tradition and inquisitorial repression, an enemy was fabricated that justified bonfires, silence and dispossession. Thus, the word ‘witch’ became a label laden with suspicion and violence, but also a mirror in which the fears of a society that did not tolerate female autonomy were projected.
Carmen B. Mikelarena's research starts from this territory laden with history and symbolic resonances to question not only how the figure of the witch was constructed, but also what that process reveals about our own culture. Magical thinking, far from belonging only to the past, reappears today in various forms: in rituals, pseudo-therapies, horoscopes, or contemporary spiritual practices that dialogue with the human need for meaning.
From Bitamine, in this geographical and cultural margin where languages, memories, and borders converge, this project finds its natural place. Because investigating how a witch is constructed also means delving into the mechanisms of exclusion and the strategies of resistance that women have faced, both yesterday and today. And because naming -Izena duen guztia bada*—is to bring into existence: this forest of magical thinking gives voice and body back to those who were reduced to silence.
Helga Massetani Piemonte
