The Good Witch? A Performative Lecture with Juliette Lizotte

During this performative lecture visual artist Juliette Lizotte aka jujulove introduces us to her practice developped around the figure of the witch. Through the lense of the Witch Way Now? film program, the performance lecture focusses specifically on The Wizard of Oz, in which Juliette will show a shifting point in the depiction of the witch as an inspiring character.

Juliette Lizotte aka jujulove has worked for the past years with the figure of the witch. In her audiovisual installation and performance ‘Sisters of the Wind’ (2021) the witch takes many shapes but is always inherently attuned to all beings and caring for all of them. In her most recent research Juliette is looking at the specific events of the witch hunts of the early 17th century in the Basque Country, between Spain and France where her ancestry resides. This historical moment marks a violent shift from an animistic view of the world to a more unified belief system led by the expansion of Christianism. The figure of the witch emerges from this ideological confrontation, representing the perfect heretic and growing in a collective imaginary of Evil. Between reality and fiction, history and myth, magic exists in many forms with its worst side residing with the witch. When worlds collide, who and what gets to survive, who becomes the monster, who becomes the hero?

Echoing the exciting selection of films proposed for ‘Witch way now?’ Juliette will take you on a stroll through cinematic references that fed her research starting from the one and only Glinda, the ‘good’ witch of the Wizard of Oz, that will play on the same night. The 1939 movie is an absolute classic adapted from a 1900 children book by Lyman Frank Baum that marks the most known depiction of a “good witch” in popular culture. Glinda’s character in the Oz universe was most likely inspired by his mother in law Matilda Joslyn Gage thinking and writings. In 1893 she argues in feminist treaty Woman, Church, and State that witches were women persecuted for being an intellectual threat to the Church. This rehabilitation of the figure of the witch is widely influenced by Jules Michelet’s infamous essay “La Sorcière” (1862) that proposes a positive and romantic gaze on the witch. The good witch in the Wizard of Oz shines especially in contrast to the wicked witch in the movie who presents all the attires of the stereotypical popular culture witch as we know it. Purely evil, mean and ugly, a real trickster… Used and reused so many times before and perpetuated again since then, how did the mythical and historical witch figure evolve? From Glinda (Wizard of Oz) to Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent) to yubaba (Spirited Away) to Samantha (Bewitched) to Willow (Buffy the vampire slayer) to Sabrina (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and more, let’s invoke these multifaceted and complex characters and put them in the light of an eco-queer-transfeminism to practice the deconstruction of conventional narrative tropes starting with Good vs. Evil.

After the performative lecture a screening of The Wizard of Oz will also take place in LAB111. Tickets for this viewing are available here.