Lacuna Festivals

10/05/2026

We are back at The Lacuna Studios. The skies are blue. The sun is shining and the olive trees are blossoming. Soon the olives will be growing and in no time at all we will be back to harvesting and pressing! And this year we are inviting you to be a part of harvest.

We are looking for volunteers to stay for 1 or 2 weeks during November and December. Your stay is free (of course!) and on harvest days you'll be invited to join us in a communal feast after we've been to the Co-op with our harvest for the day. Aside from harvesting, your time is your own to explore the local area, relax around the pool or just enjoy the countryside.

We'll ask you to work approx. 4 hours in the grove. Jobs include picking the olives by hand, harvesting using an olive tickler, moving the olive nets, collecting the full crates up, strimming, and stacking up any leftover branches. It is likely we will harvest 4 or 5 days a week but it is really weather dependent. No harvesting can be done in the rain or if it's too blustery.

If you are interested or would like to find out more, please get in touch directly with us by sending us a message here on Facebook.

15/04/2026

It's been a quiet couple of months on our Instagram but that's because it's so busy in real life! We're working on our new website, observing the changes in the grove as the seasons change, studying online and adding important texts to our library. There are more updates coming soon so watch this space!

19/01/2026

17/01/2026

We had an amazing night last night at the inauguration of 'El mar hirviendo' by Gordana Zikic at The Local Air Valencia
It was great to meet up with some amazing artists, view Gordana's fabulous exhibition, and also get a behind the scenes tour of the great space created by Dr Theresa Wilshusen

About the Artist

Gordana Zikic - Gotza Gotza is an interdisciplinary artist, community builder, and curator based in Barcelona, working internationally. Her artistic practice moves fluidly across painting, drawing, photography, installation, performance, video, and material-based processes, grounded in long-term research and embodied experience.

Her work draws on ecology, archaeology, spirituality, and ritual practices, often referencing ancient symbolic systems and reinterpreting them through contemporary forms. Rather than reproducing traditions, she approaches ritual as a living process-something that can be adapted, fragmented, and reimagined to speak to present-day realities.

Water and the sea recur throughout her practice as both material and metaphor: sites of reflection, instability, memory, and transformation. These elements function as thresholds-spaces where personal narratives intersect with collective histories, and where identity is understood as fluid rather than fixed.

Alongside her artistic practice, she is deeply engaged in building artistic communities and collaborative frameworks. She is the co-founder and director of the art association Center 424, co-founder of Belgrade Artist in Residence, and initiator of Virtual Studio Groups (VSG), creating spaces for exchange, support, and shared inquiry among artists across borders.

She holds a Ph.D. in Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade (2018) and is a member of ULUS (Serbia) and La Escocesa (Spain).

03/01/2026

We are still working hard harvesting this year's olive crop.
Keep up to date over on The Lacuna Studios page for all the information about our upcoming creative residencies, and also our very own fresh, cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil.

Art studios with a difference!

22/11/2025

Well......that's the last of the posts from 'Our Bodies, Our Homes' Lacuna Festivals 2024.
We both want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has been a part of this very unusual version of our

If you are not aware yet, we have had to relocate just outside of Cocentaina, Alicante, Spain and are now working to develop an olive grove into a fully functional regenerative eco-farm.

Not only is our plan to regenerate the olive grove, but we are working hard to regenerate the farm itself, into residential art studios; we have so much work to do but soon you will be able to come and stay, be as creative as you can be, as well as being immersed in the beautiful countryside of rural Spain.

Follow our The Lacuna Studios pages to keep up to date with our progression. (We have just milled our very first batch of hand picked, cold pressed, unfiltered, virgin olive oil from our olive grove).









N.B. We were unable to show all submissions due to image format, file type, hosting restrictions.

22/10/2025

Mehreen Hashmi - Pakistan

Voices, chaos of thoughts in my mind, emotional warfare in my heart, and the mental travel between sanity and insanity, all get a visual depiction in my work. I make work to celebrate my resilience, explore my emotions, and visualize myself as an entire person. It all speaks to me in the end as self-portraits. My work has evolved with time and ongoing healing while accepting the dysfunctionality of my mind and nerves. What is healing though? Does it cure to the fullest and I will lose my series of thoughts which has been my closest companion? Although it's more than chaotic thoughts. I am a person who is interrogating my unorthodox identity as a functional person while going through social judgment between sanity and insanity through my work. The survivor of several sexual assaults, severe childhood abuse living with CPTSD, and developmental trauma has been part of my daily life. It narrates a paradigm between survival mode as an effect of the triggered stage and days earned after sanity with my resilience. I explore the metamorphosis of my emotions and venerability with
hope of healing. I have explored the connection between a person living a mundane life while performing everyday tasks and the mental state affected by my cerebral thoughts. Most of my work is based on the raw emotions caused by triggers in an amalgamation of creating as an artist. My agony is my strength and I use this chaos of emotions to fuel my journey of creating that self who is enough for me hence the self-portraits as one can only tell one's own story. Mentally I live in a world that cannot be translated, it can be dreamed of or touched through visuals, hence it serves as my catharsis. I have created my language to communicate with this prudent world, some understand it, and some judge it, my autobiographical work narrates it well for me.
Artwork titles:
Perserverance
Sleep

13/10/2025

Innermandalasigns/ Ingrid ter Horst - the Netherlands

I create a mandala from sidewalk chalk containing images of (female) bodies, flower petals and natural elements.

Maybe also with (a) brick wall as in the fact that people are 'hiding' in their houses/ behind (inner/ imaginary) walls because of fear of judgement, violence etc.

""my soul that resides in my body... my body that is not only part of nature, but is also nature itself""
Artwork titles:
Freedom
On my way
Core

10/10/2025

Yiou Wang - China/US
Alina Tofan - Romania


“Water Always Goes Where It Wants to Go” is an ecoperformance digital short film of the body in synergy with the storied landscape of water. How can we go back to something we already have? We are born out of water, and water constitutes our body, our territories, and our myths. Mapping water through the body, in between transitory space for waters, the video art investigates the relationship between the self, its embodied and somatic dialogues, and these physical and symbolic waters, questioning how we can return to our first water, the common body. Ecoperformance conceives the environment and the body as inseparable dimensions of life. Alina Tofan’s movement was motion captured and reinvented, evoking waterscape’s corporealities. As we imagine futures of co-existence with the network of life, this work investigates how water incarnates human beings in the language of animism.

The work conveys that the environment is alive and embodied. In digital avatars and virtual forms, which are symbolic representations of the artists’ cultures and ancestors’ myths and historical relations with water, water and the body are inseparable dimensions of life. Performer Alina Tofan’s movement was motion captured and reinvented in her digital bodies. The avatars are designed with 3D scans of live and dead matters from the waterscape. Human biology is deeply linked to water and physically sustained by water, but the meaning of water is beyond the sum of the physical and chemical processes. Emphasizing the need to reconnect with the water and with both its wonders and sorrows, the work calls for a return to a more embodied relationship with nature, guided by interconnectedness and respect. It advocates for artistic-poetic storytelling as a means to inspire the shift towards a living future of coexistence and care.

Artwork titles:
Water Always Goes Where It Wants to Go

07/10/2025

fresh cut paper studio - Canada


This 100% paper still-life, created using only repurposed scraps and offcuts, is a commentary on the climate crisis, specifically our throw-away society’s destructive impact on marine life. Represented here are the top five “deadliest ocean trash” according to : fishing gear, plastic utensils, balloons, cigarette butts, and bottle caps. According to the Conservancy, 690 species that call the ocean home have been negatively impacted by this type of marine debris. Experts say that loss of ocean biodiversity is accelerating, and 29% of the seafood species humans consume have already crashed. If the long-term trend continues, in 30 years there will be little or no seafood available for sustainable harvest. In other words, soon we may have more trash than fish in our oceans. In the spirt of this project, nothing was purchased to create this piece. I used whatever paper I had lying around the studio, mostly scraps and offcuts from previous projects. Fishing net: washi paper hand-twisted into twine and weaved using traditional net-making technique. Bottle caps: centuries-old paper-rolling technique. Ci******es: Hand-rolled with finely shredded black/brown paper. The bright colours are inspired by the rainbow trash movement, where artists use salvaged beach/ocean garbage to create art.

Artwork titles:
Catch of the Day
P***y Power

07/10/2025

fresh cut paper studio - Canada


This 100% paper still-life, created using only repurposed scraps and offcuts, is a commentary on the climate crisis, specifically our throw-away society’s destructive impact on marine life. Represented here are the top five “deadliest ocean trash” according to : fishing gear, plastic utensils, balloons, cigarette butts, and bottle caps. According to the Conservancy, 690 species that call the ocean home have been negatively impacted by this type of marine debris. Experts say that loss of ocean biodiversity is accelerating, and 29% of the seafood species humans consume have already crashed. If the long-term trend continues, in 30 years there will be little or no seafood available for sustainable harvest. In other words, soon we may have more trash than fish in our oceans. In the spirt of this project, nothing was purchased to create this piece. I used whatever paper I had lying around the studio, mostly scraps and offcuts from previous projects. Fishing net: washi paper hand-twisted into twine and weaved using traditional net-making technique. Bottle caps: centuries-old paper-rolling technique. Ci******es: Hand-rolled with finely shredded black/brown paper. The bright colours are inspired by the rainbow trash movement, where artists use salvaged beach/ocean garbage to create art.

Artwork titles:
Catch of the Day