
Capital and The Witch
Emancipatory Performances Through Silvia Federici’s Narrative
In Capital and the Witch, we enter a space of tension where the figure of the witch detaches from its fictional framework and confronts reality. Through our collaboration between Spanish performer Mayte Olmedilla and Panamanian photographer Alba Juliao, we dismantle the myth of the witch and subvert its stereotypes—not to rehabilitate its image, but to expose the distortion that emerges when the cliché is torn from the imaginary realm of monstrosity and revealed in its rawness. The witch is not merely a figure of transgression; it is a lenticular image in which fiction and truth, fabricated representation and the materiality of bodies historically cast aside for refusing submission, coexist simultaneously.
In contrast to normalized, compliant bodies, the witch embodies a fissure, a displacement that destabilizes structures of obedience and control. Its image, domesticated by the narrative of fear, becomes deformed when extracted from the realm of fiction and made present. It is neither a neutral symbol nor an innocuous construct but a representation imbued with violence, used to justify the persecution and disciplining of those who have defied imposed norms. And it is precisely in this displacement that true monstrosity emerges by contrast: that of the capitalist system, which radically mediates our lives, normalizing bodies, regulating desires, and administering violence under the guise of order and progress. In this sense, our research resonates with Silvia Federici’s work on the historical connection between capitalism, witch hunts, and the control of women’s bodies—a genealogy of oppression that remains disturbingly relevant today.
Our work draws from collective memory, resistance, and reinvention but also from distortion and misalignment. Capital and the Witch becomes a poetic laboratory where, through the subversion of cliché, we not only expose the fractures of an inherited image but also reveal the fragility of the narratives that seek to fix bodies within the boundaries of acceptability. In this sense, art operates as a space of dislocation, capable of breaking established structures and generating new ways of being and being seen.







