SOPRA SOTTO functions as a living laboratory grounded in experimentation, co-creation and creative exchange.

 

The residencies are communal living experiences that explore how we relate, live, and create together beyond dominant systems. Slower daily rhythms offer space to reconnect with oneself, others, and nature. Everyday life centers around shared cooking and meals, time in nature, creative workshops, rest, occasional excursions, and open dialogue. Art is approached as a lens, co-living as a method, relationship as a research, and presence becomes practice.

​

The residency offers a framework to work with themes around community, ecology, embodiment, system change, healing and our relationship to nature, body, and spirit. Each residency is shaped around changing overarching themes, often co-developed a collaborator with specific experience and knowledge on the topic. The content of each residency is largely shaped by the residents themselves, with a participatory structure based on a co-created workshop program. The residency is built by residents for residents, through cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration, and collective experimentation.

​

Together, residents create a shared container to examine paradigms that no longer serve us, and to explore how extractive systems can be reworked into more regenerative ways of being. Creatives have the power to shape narratives and ideas, and can influence cultural consciousness through ripple effect. Art becomes a tool for questioning, reflection, research, and dialogue, inviting participants to challenge assumptions and explore new ways of sensing and understanding the world. Creative expression is understood as a means for connection, emotional expression, and collective healing. 

​

The residency is for interdisciplinary culture shapers from a wide range of fields, including artists in different media, writers, researchers, philosophers, educators, scientists, dancers, musicians, and other creators and changemakers. It welcomes people from all backgrounds, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, religions, sexual orientations, and walks of life, and is shaped around diversity, openness, and shared practice across communities and disciplines.

​

SOPRA SOTTO prioritizes a process-based approach over fixed outcomes, and exists as an ongoing experiment offering a space for collective (un)learning and reflection grounded in curiosity and presence. Running since 2023, SOPRA SOTTO is evolving toward longer-term residency programs in Sardinia from late 2026 onwards, developing a more rooted project for communal living, critical inquiry, and creative exchange.