Visual Artists and Witchcraft: Magic as a Creative Tool for Political Struggle

Abstract

Many contemporary artists call upon the iconography of witchcraft, rewriting its past stories, exploring current ones, or actualizing practices and gestures (Camille Ducellier, Tatiana Karl Pez, Myriam Mihindou). Beyond folklore and esotericism, the witch is for these artists a figure of female emancipation with powerful subversive potential. Since the creation of the W.I.T.C.H. and the birth of anti‐nuclear movements in the United States in the 1970s, women have emerged as producers of rituals capable of generating collective power from different perspectives of struggle (feminist, ecologist, anti‐capitalist). This militant projection is now resurfacing with force, particularly through the first gatherings of Witch Bloc Paris. Artists are also reviving the tradition of ritual, designing actions whose objective is to bring politics and magic together. In this paper, we will question how artists reinvest ritual practices associated with the imagination of witchcraft, while proposing new forms of creative resistance.