For spring 2026, SOPRA SOTTO invited 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.
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.
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.
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.
RESIDENTS
Rachel Cronin
Rachel Cronin is an interdisciplinary early career researcher, based between Scotland and Ireland.
Her research focuses on decolonisation through storytelling, centering cultural and community preservation, and celebration, to explore issues of injustice. Colonisation is deeply rooted in the process of erasure.
Learning different ways to consciously preserve is pivotal to her journey in anti-colonial storytelling. Her practice is deeply embedded in the lessons she has learned from hearing other people tell their stories. Her work in this way is deeply laced in memory and identity.
Gunay Rzazada
Gunay Rzazada is a cultural heritage researcher and practitioner working on material culture, craft traditions, and food heritage.
Her work explores how everyday objects, culinary practices, and artistic traditions shape identity and carry memory, particularly in contexts marked by displacement and cultural change. She is interested in how craft, food, and other forms of material culture help communities maintain a sense of belonging and continuity, even when political and social conditions disrupt their histories.
Through ethnographic engagement and visual storytelling, she collaborates with communities to document and revive endangered crafts, foodways, and local knowledge.
Diletta 'Bonnie' Belotti
Diletta “Bonnie” Bellotti is an Italian mobilizer and showdyke.
They are a columnist on socio-political movements for L’Espresso and Il Fatto Quotidiano. They hold an MA in International Migration from the University of Kent and in 2020 published “Pomodori Rosso Sangue” (Nottetempo).
They are a co-host, with Viola Valéry, of the show “Buonasera Cretine” and contributes to lesbodramas in the role of Cupid at queer parties across Europe.
Laura Bokhoven
Laura Bokhoven (1995, The Netherlands) is a filmmaker based in Amsterdam. After earning a BA in Art History at the University of Amsterdam, she graduated in 2022 from the Netherlands Film Academy.
These two backgrounds continue to inform and enrich one another. As a documentary director, she is interested in the ways imagination can be used to fill in what we do not know or understand. This often leads her to moments, places, and individuals that exist at the edges of our attention.
Laura is drawn to stories that raise questions rather than provide answers. In her current practice, Laura seeks to move away from a result-driven production cycle and instead embrace a more open and intuitive approach to making. With an emphasis on DIY methods, she aims to explore through the act of making itself and is curious to push boundaries and experiment with different forms of storytelling.
Irene Carlet
Irene moves through the world at the intersection of fundamental rights and the tangible ways we protect collective and individual wellbeing. A lawyer and researcher by training, her journey across Europe, Australia, and Latin America has been a sustained inquiry into how legal and social structures hold the weight of human vulnerability.
For Irene, research is a creative act: a way of interpreting and listening to the silences within systems and envisioning alternative paths through narrative and language. Beyond the academic, she is dedicated to a network of women with whom she organizes to reflect on exclusionary structures and cultivate professional cultures rooted in dialogue and mutual respect.
Writing is her primary tool for navigating the space between the systemic and the felt. She explores prose and poetry to allow intuition to lead, seeking to transform observation into a narration of how we inhabit our cities and how we define home. Her work seeks to understand how we care for one another and find meaning within isolation, fueled by the belief that kindness and contemplation are potent, quiet methods of knowledge-seeking, often carried by marginalised voices and the natural world.
She enters this residency to weave her legal sensitivity into a creative practice that honors plurality, intuition, and the delicate textures of the everyday.
Amy Cat
Amy Cat (she/they) is a social worker-turned-liberationist based in the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, Amy spent a decade in conventional pathways of social change: working with children and families in the foster care system, advocating for systems-level change through legislative policy, and teaching social work students in university.
These experiences led to a deeper awareness of the roots of systemic injustice, and ultimately a reckoning with what it means to create truly radical change. In 2020, Amy left their career to embark on a multiyear journey of nomadic living, plant medicine, communal co-existence, and ancestrally-rooted community transformation. What emerged was an embodied understanding that cultural liberation begins from within.
Amy's current work weaves her early foundations in social services with her more recent culturally expansive explorations. She now creates spaces for leaders, community weavers, heart-centered changemakers, and empathic visionaries to dismantle systemic oppression from the inside out - through radical imagination, authentic creativity, and conscious embodiment of the liberative future we desire
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