BAR 2025 #12 – Carmen B. Mikelarena

Since 2012, as part of its grants and residency programmes, Bitamine it has been organising an annual selection process for an artist for the development and execution of a research and artistic production project. The interest of the programme lies in generating a result that stimulates reflection and the integration of the different perspectives that are produced in/from the margins.

The aim of this programme is to encourage research and the production of artistic projects related to the problems of the margin, promoting the mobility of artists and the development of projects, with a special focus on the legacy consisting of this publication that summarises the results of the research carried out during the residency.

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 possessed of knowledge that escaped male authority. On the threshold between myth and heresy, between oral tradition and inquisitorial repression, an enemy was created 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 to name –Izena duen guztia bada*– is to bring into existence: this forest of magical thinking gives back a voice and a body to those who were reduced to silence.

Helga Massetani Piemonte

*Everything that has a name exists.

AUTHOR

Carmen B. Mikelarena is a young artist from Madrid whose work spans disciplines as varied as comics, illustration, textile art, painting, and ceramics. Her career has been recognised with awards and grants such as the Laboral Kutxa Award (2021), the Comic Art Europe grant (2022), the second Carlos Giménez Prize (Hierba Aplastada), her comic Etileno, funded by Injuve grants for creation 2023, the Comic Barcelona 2024 grant and, this year, the FANZIMAD prize for ‘¡Al Congelador!!!!!!’.

Language: Spanish / Basque
Published by: Bitamine Kultur Elkartea
Editorial direction: Helga Massetani Piemonte
Author: Carmen B. Mikelarena
Translations: Belen Pikabea
Design and layout: Estudio Moriskette
ISBN 978-84-09-77371-8 (ES) 978-84-09-77372-5 (EUS)
Legal Deposit: LG D 01024-2025
Guipúzcoa, Basque Country
2025