Three weeks unfold around a bold experimental program at Las Cigarreras in Alicante, turning the old tobacco warehouses into a dynamic space for care, collaboration, and creativity. The venue’s vaulted concrete courtyard frames a festival that invites neighborhoods to engage with making, thinking, and imagining together, continuing a two-century tradition of community use at the site.
The second edition of Shared Fictions occupies the old tobacco factory, now a center for culture and experimentation, through October 22. Its fifth season features a festival of material exploration organized by the Valencian Community of Museums Consortium, in collaboration with Las Cigarreras. The space becomes a hub where architecture, art, and social practice merge to question how matter and place shape human experience.
The festival’s theme this year, elevate the world, treats the world itself as a material to be researched, manipulated, and reimagined. Installations, workshops, and performances probe what matter can do when it meets human curiosity. The organizers suggest soil is more than a habitat or waste; it represents the product of living processes. They imagine a future where geological layers hold DNA, footprints, bodies, and traces of energy, where boundaries between organic and artificial blur as human labor and natural processes intertwine. Elevating the world means rethinking what is possible when these boundaries dissolve.
During the three weeks, the program experiments with boundary surfaces, speculative borders, and politicized materials such as mud, espartograss, copper, lithium, water, waste, and roots. Youth and adults participate in workshops, musical performances, screenings, and gatherings, exploring how we relate to matter not as a mere resource but as a key agent in a new ecological paradigm that transcends traditional human-centered thinking.
The schedule sets two major festival days on Saturday, October 15 and 22 at Las Cigarreras, with screenings on Friday, October 14, a concert on October 21, and a series of workshops running from October 2 through 22.
The agenda features proposals from the collective La Cuarta Piel, complemented by AMA Made in Cielo association, DJs Light Savior and Krystales, artist Silvia Limiñana, ethnobotanist Dani Climent, filmmakers Benja Fernández and Irene Sánchez Mora, and architects Marta Arrizabalaga, Alba Morcillo, Bea López, and Andrea Manero.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13
Archaeology at the Cantonà site
Valencia Street, 9. 18h.
Participants conduct an archaeological dig to uncover neighborhood histories buried beneath the site layers. Seeds preserved in the ground will be saved, stories will sprout in a garden and in found objects for pollinators from earthworks.
Stay Till Fade: Charms
18:00
The workshop invites attendees to experience transformation and decay of everyday objects. Precious talismans and discarded waste share a fate in the same decomposition process as participants explore molding, metal casting, and modeling to craft new narratives about artificial geology and its deposition.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14
character workshop
Ruben GoMo+ Radioboy
18:00
ground shaking
Screening of short films by Benja Fernández and Irene Sánchez Mora
20:00
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15
feast day
Las Cigarreras 17:00
clay workshop
With the urban soil gathered from the expedition, participants will craft a bowl and a chalice—an offering for a future ceremony. A workshop where mud becomes sculpture and narrative, at 6:30 p.m.
baix pavement, beach
Textile recycling and graphic sharing led by @dvander.h and AMA Made in Cielo, with @laGildaLaboratoriGrafic. 7:30 p.m.
proof of the future
An installation-driven narrative where participants co-create a possible future with matter. The Espacio Incógnita team (Murcia) guides guests to craft a story with fictional paleontology. 8:30 p.m.
forest ceremony
An exceptional moment in the Secadero: a vast void that sparks a collision of knowledge and memory from deep within the Earth. The ceremony explores what disruption brings, what opens up, and what is needed from those present, accompanied by dj Krystales (Valencia) and dj Light Savior (Alicante) to weave a palimpsest of time, mineralization, and weathering.
Tuesday, October 18
Archaeology at la Cantonà 2 site
C/ Valencia, 9. 18h.
Reconstruct the neighborhood stories again through an archaeological dig and the garden’s seeds, with found objects for pollinators in earthworks.
cave interpretation
18:00
Children’s workshop to create stories from interpretations of an installation piece, imagining new caves of our time for future inhabitants of the world.
Wednesday, October 19
Usefulness and toxicity of plants
Route through the Carolinas. 18:00
An ethnobotanical journey led by Dani Climent (Alicante) to reveal a barely visible world through plant relationships and ancient connections between people and flora.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20
Primitive Rabassa
Trip to Rabassa. 18:00
The event centers on constructing a primitive sanctuary near the Rabassa lagoons using techniques inspired by Primitive Technologies, developed into a living, collective design.
purification spell
Drying room 20h.
A shared ritual where bathing becomes cleansing, and even drinking holds a caustic edge. Clay altars, soil, vegetation, and water converge to heal bodies.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21
makeup workshop
Drying room, 18:00
Ruben GoMo+ with Radioboy
concert of the ringing bassband
Drying room. 19:00
A distinctive concert built from waste and everyday objects, featuring more than thirty instruments with a wide range of timbres and rhythms.
Saturday, October 22
feast day
Dryer
jewelry workshop
17:30
Recycling old electronic components into new jewelry pieces, blending art and sustainability.
pot workshop
6:30 p.m.
The soil’s leftovers become material for life: plant residues, kitchen scraps, and other byproducts are transformed into sustenance for cuttings.
Call Workshop
7:30 p.m.
Among many strong proposals, one is chosen to share neighborhood knowledge within Shared Fictions.
karaoke
9:30 p.m.
A karaoke evening where monsters emerge to sing and celebrate.