The offer comprises 5,200 euros allocated between wages and project development to support national initiatives. A dozen projects have been submitted to Residencias A Quemarropa, spanning the country, reflecting a push to elevate contemporary art in public spaces and within artistic circles while contributing to climate action and a more sustainable society.
The project will debut with an exhibition on October 27. It will be installed in room 0 at Las Cigarreras. The participating artists include HeHe Collective, founded by Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen in Le Havre, France, Madrid-based visual artist and filmmaker Elena Lavelles, artist and performer Jabulani Maseko, and the creative investigator Joana Moll, who works between Berlin and Barcelona.
Leading the curation is Manuel Prados from Seville, born 1981. His practice centers on artistic research and contextual art, with a recent focus on the origins of natural and artificial materials in art and the socioeconomic consequences of their procurement.
The exhibition project No Return, dynamics of lost energy, addresses climate change as a multifactorial issue. The complexity of factors is communicated through a diverse selection of works that explore different approaches to a shared problem.
The piece explores irreversible changes caused by human action and natural processes. It links alarms such as deforestation in the Amazon, loss of Arctic ice, and the decline of coral reefs, highlighting how disturbances in one area can trigger chain reactions affecting others.
From Interactive Works to Tables
Residencias A Quemarropa brings together participants such as Juan Fuster, Miriam Martínez Guirao, Ana Pastor, and Carolina Fuentes de Las Cigarreras to form the selection jury. They justify choosing Prados as the curator for the quality and relevance of the works, which will be shown on October 27 and will include interactive installations, painting, and video.
The jury praises the caliber of other participants, noting the ambitious quality given the tight timeline and the challenges of a political year. The proposal foregrounds climate change and also considers carbon footprint aspects of art and the commitment of artists to sustainable practice.
Artists
HeHe Collective engages with social, industrial, and ecological themes within today’s technological landscape. Their cross-disciplinary practice investigates the ties between art, media, and the environment.
Elena Lavelles examines how capitalism drives resource extraction and cross-border exploitation, alongside social resistance movements.
Joana Moll critically investigates how automated systems in post-apocalyptic narratives affect human literacy and ecological understanding, while Jabulani Maseko presents performative processes that explore embodiment and self-awareness.
About Point Blank
Here is how Residencias A Quemarropa approaches projects: experimental and responsive to the changing needs of the city’s cultural life. In 2014, the group established the first artist residence in the Valencian Community, prioritizing creative experimentation and residency-based artistic research. The initiative aims to present new artistic visions to the community in Alicante and make them accessible to the public. The same group also created the Piedra, Papel Tijera ALC project, which later evolved into the OpenArt festival.