VAPORES: Between water, air, and earth
Artistic residencies in El Campello and Licenza.
Beatriz Freire - Alba Feito – Idensitat
Exhibition open from 7th October 2025 to 2nd November 2025 / Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras, Alicante
Opening: 7th October 2025, 7 p.m. Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras, Alicante (Calle San Carlos, 78). Includes a performance with sound and textiles by Beatriz Freire.
VAPORES is an Idensitat project, in collaboration with the Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras in Alicante, and the Casa de Cultura in El Campello, centering upon the Alicante’s Monnegre River, and the area around the Centro d'Arte e Natura di Civitella di Licenza – L'Aquila Reale. Processes of investigation and production have been deployed through an artistic residency in each location, focusing upon multiple social interpretations, artistic possibilities, and environmental aspects.
With regard to the Monnegre River, artist Beatriz Freire has realised “A Texture Map of Monnegre River”, and a series of artistic mediation activities with the El Clot de l'Illot and Enric Valor secondary schools in El Campello. Alba Feito’s residency took place in the Monti Lucretili Regional Natural Park, in Civitella di Licenza.
The artworks presented in the exhibition are the products of these situated working processes, and at the same time, represent two different ways of conceiving and implementing a site-specific artistic residency. In Beatriz Freire's artwork, the poetic exploration of the river is articulated through textiles, images, and sound, in dialogue with an intense educational mediation programme guided by Idensitat. In the case of Alba Feito, the residency was a device for observation and material translation, focusing upon the reciprocal relationships between the human and the non-human, which takes as its main strand the presence and symbolism of the golden eagle in the region through ceramics and drawing.
A Texture Map of Monnegre River
Beatriz Freire Residency
May - June, 2025
The Monnegre River is special. Throughout its course, almost always with an intermittent seasonal flow, we find both a hundred year old and recent hydraulic infrastructures, resiliency vegetable gardens, underground pipes, water and orchards which emerge from the Alacant North Waste-Water Treatment Plant. There is also a great variety of plants, birds and insects, and social memories which define its landscape and its identity. In this river, the hydrological cycle has ceased to govern the rhythms of the water. The well-being of this environment’s human and non-human ecosystems now depends upon an irregular supply of treated urban water, or often intense seasonal rainfall.
The project has developed two lines of work in parallel, which in turn have generated mutual understandings and shared echoes: a residency of artistic investigation and production by artist Beatriz Freire, selected in an international open call, and a series of artistic mediation processes in El Clot de l'Illot and Enric Valor, two secondary schools in El Campello. This exhibition displays how this project has made use of artistic processes to explore connections and intersections between the artist in residence, the educational context, and the river, by means of artistic processes.
A Texture Map of Monnegre River, by Beatriz Freire, inspired by Anna Lockwood’s A Sound Map of the Hudson River, is a sensory mapping of the Monnegre River, focusing on its visible and invisible textures. Through techniques such as photography, analog film cinema, frottage, collection of materials, and soundscape recording with microphones and hydrophones.The project translates trace elements of the river such as stones, sediments, vegetation, evidence of water flow, and soundscapes into graphic patterns and textile notations, generating an archive which connects sound, image and matter opening up new ways of perceiving the environment.
Between May and June, a series of artistic mediation processes were realised both inside and outside the classroom with students of IES Enric Valor and IES El Clot de l’Illot. Students explored a variety of artistic techniques and languages, such as painting, photography, video, soundscaping or writing. These intersections between the artist's practice and classroom experimentation gave rise to shared ideas around the Montnegre River, bringing students closer to contemporary practices which intertwined art, nature, and social space, and turning the residency into a bridge between artistic research and educational context.
The development of VAPORES in the context of the Montnegre River has been possible thanks to Casa de Cultura El Campello, the Centre Cultural Las Cigarreras in Alicante, and the teachers and students from the IES Enric Valor and IES El Clot de l'Illot.
L’Aquila Reale
Alba Feito Residency
September, 2024 - January, 2025
The Aniene River Valley is located in the ecosystem of the Parco Naturale Regionale dei Monti Lucretili, a natural park affected by radical transformations in agriculture, by industrial developments, and by the consolidation of urban society. The park is known as the natural habitat of golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), protagonists of the local environment and the main reason for taking the decision to protect all the Lucretili mountains which make up the park.
VAPORES was developed in the area of the natural park in Licenza, with Alba Feito’s residency, and the collaboration between Idensitat and L’Aquila Reale. Centro d’Arte e Natura di Civitella di Licenza; a cultural centre located in the Aniene Valley which has a wide network of territorial relationships. Licenza, is a town in the province of Rome, comprising various old houses rehabilitated and until recently uninhabited due to rural depopulation in the region. Alba Feito’s residency was based upon research and artistic experimentation in the area, taking the golden eagle, the central figure of the park, as a symbol in order to explain the relationship between the human and the non-human, and its consequences.
The project L'Aquila Reale realised between September 2024 and January 2025 by Alba is based upon an examination of the reciprocal relationships between the human and the non-human, using the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), typical of the area, as a central symbol in her artwork, drawing attention to the problems the eagle experiences as a result of tree densification, the reduction of open spaces, and the human influx, all factors which have made its reproduction difficult in recent years.
This symbol, often linked to imperialist and patriarchal narratives which exalt strength and sovereignty, is radically reinterpreted by Alba. Through ceramics and drawing, she has subverted the traditional representation, transforming it into a symbol of interdependence and tenderness. Following Donna Haraway's call to "be with the problem," she deconstructs established meanings by imagining new cultural and ecological relationships.
Her process with ceramics and drawing is a transformative approach in which the material conveys ecological and social messages. Her practice challenges anthropocentrism, proposing a broader reflection upon the coexistence of life forms. With ceramics, Alba tells stories which are not only personal but also collective, linked to communities and territories, inviting us to reassess the links between culture and nature in a more equitable and sustainable way.
Studying the graphic forms of Etruscan ceramics, Alba reworks motifs which question the notion of hierarchical power, proposing instead a vision of the eagle as part of a network of interconnections. Her artworks invite us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world, and to consider the need for a balance between human and non-human life forms and inanimate objects.
Alfa Feito’s artistic research residency is part of the Festival LaValle project: residency programmes conceived and promoted by the Associazione Collettivo L'Aquila Reale in collaboration with Idensitat. It is funded by the Culture Moves Europe programme of Creative Europe, managed by the Goethe-Institut, in collaboration with the Parco Naturale Regionale dei Monti Lucretili, and the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Artists: Beatriz Freire and Alba Feito
Curated and mediated by: Idensitat (Roser Colomar Palazón, Ramon Parramon, Irati Irulegi, Albert Gironès, Anna Recasens)
With the participation of: IES El Clot de l'Illot and IESEnric Valor, El Campello.
Special thanks to: Miriam Gilabert and the team at Casa de Cultura El Campello, Carolina Fuentes and the Las Cigarreras team, Francisco Navarrete and Andrés Gallardo from Centro d'Arte e Natura di Civitella di Licenza – L'Aquila Reale.
Project organised by Idensitat, Casa de Cultura El Campello and Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras in Alicante. With the support of the Centro d'Arte e Natura di Civitella di Licenza – L'Aquila Reale and Generalitat de Catalunya - Departament de Cultura.
More information about the project
