For spring 2026, SOPRA SOTTO invites Amy Cat, Rachel Cronin, Irene Carlet, Gunay Rzazada, Dilette 'Bonnie' Belotti and Laura Bokhoven (more info below). This interdisciplinary group of artists, creatives, community leaders, activists, thinkers, and culture shapers will spend 2 weeks at La Tegolaia in rural Tuscany to explore the theme: Change Makers, communal living, creativity, and care as practices of resistance.
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The residency centers creativity as a way of cultivating resilience and resistance in a time of transition, when dominant systems are unraveling and new structures and ways of being are urgently needed. Art is approached as a powerful tool to question, challenge, and educate, as well as a practice of radical (self)care, connection, embodied emotional processing, and healing.
Creative practitioners are seen as visionary change-makers and cultural alchemists, with creative practice understood as a means for imagining and building alternative realities and new narratives. The residency asks how the artist can contribute to societal transformation through ripple effects toward more interconnected, cooperative, and regenerative futures.
Set in a rural environment, the residency emphasizes reconnection to self, others, and nature. Drawing inspiration from ancestral wisdom, cyclical and seasonal living, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultural theorists such as Joanna Macy and Audre Lorde, the residency weaves togetherness, food, nature, conversation, and a ritual approach to life throughout.
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Open to artists, creators, curators, activists, community leaders, researchers, scientists, ecologists, farmers, educators and thinkers working across disciplines, including visual and sonic arts, installation, writing, film, theatre and performance, poetry, food, embodiment and healing practices.
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The residency is grounded in immersive communal living and creative exchange. It unfolds within an open and flexible container shaped by the group itself, allowing for cross-pollination of ideas and inspiration to emerge organically. This experience is not productivity driven or outcome oriented. The focus is on process, presence, creative exchange and investigation through practice.
The framework is decentralized, with a co-created program of workshops by residents, for residents. These workshops are shared moments that can take any form, including discussions, talks, rituals, performances, walks, meals, readings, movement, sound, or other experimental formats, shaped by what participants are researching, questioning, learning, or wishing to share. The residency is process-based, experimental, and DIY in spirit, offering an alternative ways of being together to todays productivity-driven models.
Daily rhythms include regular morning check-ins for alignment and sharing intentions. Communal cooking and shared meals are central moments for connection and conversation. Free time is scheduled for relaxation, research, or reflection, and a designated working area is available for individual or collaborative experiments. Visits in the local area and to Florence connect residents with Tuscany’s landscape, food, and culture.
INTENTION The residency is a living laboratory, a creative cauldron for exploration of (radical) ideas and collective critical inquiry. It is a space where artists, community builders, activists and thought leaders come together, where different perspectives, practices, experiences and bodies meet, creating room for the exchange of ideas, skills, wisdom, and ways of knowing. Collaboration and co-creation are central, with a focus on learning and unlearning together. Creators are seen as culture shapers and change-makers, envisioning alternative futures and generating ripple effects beyond their practice into contemporary culture. The intention is to experiment with and reimagine alternative ways of being. By examining current dominant social systems, the residency seeks to plant seeds for change and contribute to more caring, regenerative, and interconnected ways of living. The residency creates a space that is experimental, responsive, and grounded in the present moment. Rather than working toward an end goal, it prioritizes a process-based practice centered on the collective and shared inspiration, where slowness is seen as a form of resistance, a way to step out of hyperproductivity, and to move away from models that demand overdrive in order to be seen as valuable to capitalist society. The discomfort that can arise when slowing down is part of the process, where feeling the body and emotions helps loosen the grip of patriarchal and extractivist patterns. A key element of the communal living aspect of the residency is to bring creative inspiration into daily life through intentional moments with one another. These emerge through collective rituals such as communal cooking and shared meals, time in nature and cyclical awareness, collective workshops, moments of digital rest to support presence, and the sharing of knowledge through books or texts that have been formative. Togetherness, creating, and learning become practices of being in community, and can open space for collective healing and liberation, grounded in ancestral wisdom as a gentle counter to dominant systems that demand uniformity.
