Cigarettes has renewed its tenants’ residence in the San Antón district’s municipal cultural center. This year the center offers, for the first time, its own accommodation program for creators spanning four to eight weeks. In total, fifteen residents are developing their projects across four disciplines. A few months earlier, those selected for photography and landscape benefited from these residences, and now a new cohort is joining from the audiovisual and experimental music sections, gradually moving into the spaces in the center’s basement.
The program, developed by the Ministry of Culture under the name Land Creative Residences, carries a budget of 190,000 euros and is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (Feder) through Edusi Alicante. The aim is to promote artistic work at the center and to raise Alicante’s profile as a magnet for contemporary culture. This first edition received more than 200 proposals from around the world.
In this new phase, a jury comprised of Rose Perez (Radio3), Pedro Jimenez, Benito Jimenez, and Carolina Fuentes, coordinator of Las Cigarreras, selected four electronic music projects and sound experiments from a pool of 52 proposals. The chosen artists include Lucy Tcherno Ivanenko, Bella Báguena, Tatiana Isaza, Antonio Momblan, and Derek van Den Bulcke. The latter has previously delivered solid performances at the Prado Museum and the Düsseldorf Biennale and will arrive in a matter of weeks to develop his project. The remaining artists have already begun their residencies.
Among the residents, Isaza and Momblan, from Sant Joan d’Alacant, are preparing a work titled Forest Cry. This conceptual piece combines the sounds of nature, regional dialects, and local rhythms with electronic music to celebrate the life-giving Amazon source while urging its preservation. The project blends natural acoustics with regional instrumentation and electronic textures.
Bella Bueso is a Valencian transfeminine artist working on a project that gathers audio, visual, and written records from travels to create a soundscape in disc or EP form. The trips stem largely from a 2022 concert tour, with audio notes incorporated into the final recordings. The sounds range from the New York subway to the French countryside.
Majorcan artist Lucy Cherno Ivanenko is also working with Agency Realism / In-sound actions to develop a research project and experimental music in dialogue with different art disciplines. The goal is to collaborate with other creators across disciplinary boundaries.
All these actions will be showcased later. A mini festival is planned for June 10 at Las Cigarreras, where an invited artist will be announced soon.
audiovisual residences
A total of 78 proposals were submitted for audiovisual residency, and the jury—composed of Rocio Mateo-Sagasta (Burning House), Roser Colomar Palazon (curator and cultural coordinator), and Carolina Fuentes—selected four more participants: Amanda Moreno Caplliure, Laura Moreno Bueno, Pablo Oria Lorente, and Gustavo Rodríguez Cuneo. The first two have already started their residency at Las Cigarreras, while the latter two will begin in June. Amanda Moreno, from Valencia, explores a work titled A Sensible Politician, which contemplates sea glass memories as a fictional critique of the sea glass collection universe and its ecological impact. Laura Moreno, from Madrid, presents a project focused on reframing cinema’s landscapes, treating cinematic scenery as a geographic rather than political boundary and undertaking visual exercises related to the Alicante skyline.