MISSION STATEMENT

SOPRA SOTTO is a residency, living laboratory, and ongoing experiment, a shared field of inquiry. It brings together interdisciplinary artists, thinkers, writers, creators, visionaries, educators, activists, and change makers within an open, flexible framework for questioning, exchange, and exploration.

 

We live inside systems that are unraveling and being exposed. Structures built on extraction, hierarchy, separation, and domination are increasingly visible as exclusionary. This moment calls for other ways of being, living, working, and relating. Letting go of systems that never truly served us, and moving toward ways rooted in connection, regeneration, land, community, and accountability. While acknowledging the challenges of navigating between global awareness and local action in this digitally connected world, this balance is approached with curiosity.

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SOPRA SOTTO is a container where communal living becomes research, creativity becomes connection, and dialogue becomes method. The structure is decentralized, with residents shaping format and content through collaboration. Co-creation forms a fluid structure, shaped by those who participate, remaining in motion and open to change. It is process-based and does not focus on outcomes or tangible results. 

 

Learning is collective and embodied, unfolding through lived experience, play, and presence. Nature is a teacher rather than a resource, with intuitive knowledge alongside rational understanding. Creativity, rest, community, and care become forms of resistance, and relationship-building becomes responsibility and ongoing practice.

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​Art and creative expression are approached as practices of critical inquiry, shared (un)learning, radical imagination, dialogue, and communal exploration. Creativity becomes a language and lens rather than a commodity. Art is not decoration, aesthetic, trend, or entertainment, but a tool for subtle societal shifts. It has the power to question and challenge the status quo, while also imagining and creating new worlds alongside it.

 

Radical imagination opens space for other ways of thinking and being, and alternative futures. Not only resisting dominant systems, but building other realities in parallel as the old ones crumble. The residents, as culture shapers and changemakers, carry these experiences back into their fields, influencing culture and collective consciousness as transformation moves outward through ripple effect.​​​

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VALUES
Interconnectedness. Reciprocity. Symbiosis. Embodiment. Presence. Slowness. Care. Alignment with cyclical and seasonal rhythms. Local rootedness. Collective responsibility. Intersectionality. Diversity of perspectives. Mutual learning. Direct communication. Transparency. Humility. Curiosity. Experimentation. Non-linear thinking. Emotional honesty. Respect for complexity, paradox, and the unknown. Balance between intuition and intellect.

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RESOURCES AND INSPIRATION

• Joana Macy

• Audre Lorde

• bell hooks

• Silvia Federici

• Vandana Shiva

• Antonio Gramsci

• Bruno Latour

• Bayo Akomolafe

• David Graeber

• Frantz Fanon

• Angela Davis

• Paolo Freire

• Starhawk

• Donna Haraway

• Rebecca Solnit

• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

• Rosa Luxemburg

• Bessel van der Kolk

• Gabor Maté

• Thomas Hübl

• Rupert Sheldrake

• Simone de Beauvoir

• Ursula K. le Guinn