This August 2026, SOPRA SOTTO invites an interdisciplinary group of artists, creatives, and culture shapers to the International Theosophical Centre (ITC) for a one-week residency to explore the theme: Bridging Inner/Outer Worlds: Speaking to the Unseen through Colour, Shape, and Symbol.
The residency explores art and creativity as a language that bridges the tangible and the intangible. The theme looks at the meeting point between the material world of sensory perception and the immaterial world of spirit, intuition, the subconscious, and inner knowing.
The residency offers space to collectively explore subtler layers of reality, using art as a way to listen, sense, and interpret what lies beyond immediate visibility. In this context, we explore how art can reveal the deeper, unseen currents shaping both the individual subconscious and the collective unconscious.
Art becomes a form of communication with the subconscious through symbol, myth, and archetype, expressed beyond the rational or intellectual. A message is not only received by the conscious mind, but by the whole being as vibration, frequency, and emotion, through colour, sound, geometric form, and light. Through resonance rather than explanation, art becomes a conduit for new forms of meaning, connection, and understanding.
This SOPRA SOTTO residency is a transdisciplinary gathering of creatives from diverse practices and backgrounds. A process-based and experimental framework emphasizes communal exploration and collective learning, with the program largely co-created by the residents themselves. Through shared workshops and creative exchange, the cross-pollination of ideas, perspectives, and inspiration naturally emerges.
This residency is organized by SOPRA SOTTO and hosted at the International Theosophical Centre (ITC) in Naarden, a centre dedicated to spiritual inquiry and reflection. Set in a serene natural environment, the residency also offers space to slow down, rest, and reconnect with self, others, and the more-than-human world. The center is considered Ashram, with the associated rules of life such as vegan food, no alcohol, smoking or drugs.
DETAILS
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Dates: Sunday 9 August - Sunday 16 August, 2026
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Location: International Theosophical Centre (ITC), Naarden, The Netherlands
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Organization: SOPRA SOTTO; facilitator: Constance van Berckel
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8-10 interdisciplinary residents
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€ 545 - € 775 per person
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Prices differ per sleeping situation (tent or cabin)
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1x Scholarship position available for € 350 per person
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Costs include: location, stay; meals; program; workshops
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Costs do not include: travel costs to ITC
INTENTION
SOPRA SOTTO residencies emphasize the role of art as a seed for transformation, seeing artists and creators as agents of change. In our current rapidly shifting world, where dominant extractivist systems are unraveling, there is a growing need to imagine and give form to more positive, alternative futures. Before these worlds can be built however, they first need to be envisioned and brought into awareness.
Artists act as antennas of the zeitgeist, tuning into the psychological and spiritual state of a culture. Through cultivating intuition, artists translate the subtle frequency of the moment into art that reflects its time, like a song that is instantly and universally understood. Art becomes a channel of the collective experience, and the collective unconscious. Inspiration arrives beyond the rational mind as a spark that precedes thought, and becomes materialized through the creative process. The artist as alchemist, bringing the invisible into form.
Furthermore, creative practitioners are uniquely positioned as storytellers and culture shapers, able to challenge the status quo and craft new narratives. Art has the power to reshape cultural hegemonies and lay the groundwork for alternative ways of being rooted in reciprocity and care. Through art, these new ways of being are communicated not only to the intellect, but more directly with the subconscious, using the language of colour, sound, geometry, archetype, and symbol. While scientific reports inform with fact, film, music, and visual art moves people on a deeper emotional level, where ideas are not only understood but internalized in the subconscious. Where politics and media often misuse these tactics, artists can redirect them toward understanding, connection, and cooperation.
These deeper layers of perception are accessible through dreams, altered states, meditation, or moments of flow, yet they require stillness and attention to be heard. In today’s overstimulated world, this space of listening is often lost. The residency therefore offers space for rest, slowness, nature, and togetherness, creating conditions to quiet external noise and reconnect with inner knowing and the creative source.
INSPIRATION This residency theme is rooted in Theosophy, a spiritual tradition that explores the interconnectedness of all existence, combining philosophy, science, and Eastern and Western mysticism. It looks at consciousness and the unseen structures that shape reality through study, reflection, and direct experience. The theme is inspired by visionary artists connected to Theosophy, such as Hilma af Klint, whose abstract works translated spiritual dimensions into colour and form, Piet Mondrian, who searched for universal harmony through geometry, and Wassily Kandinsky, who explored the link between sound, emotion, and visual expression. Theosophist Annie Besant further developed this through “Thought-forms,” visualising emotions, ideas, and states of consciousness through symbols, colours, and shapes. Other influences are painters and artistic alchemists such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Odilon Redon, who created surreal, dreamlike worlds to explore hidden realities, as well as 20th-century Transcendental painter Agnes Pelton, whose mystical abstractions and use of colour evoke the sacred. Further inspirations come from musicians like Alice Coltrane, whose spiritual compositions create expansive auditory utopias, or writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, whose fictional narratives open new doors to radical imagining. The theme is also guided by Carl Jung’s work, such as The Red Book, which explores dreams, the unconscious, shadow, and archetypes as a universal language of the psyche. Esoteric traditions such as tarot also inform the theme, where symbolic imagery becomes a ritual language for engaging the subconscious and deeper layers of awareness. These examples are some of the influences that inform the residency theme as a space where art, spirituality, and (yet) unseen worlds meet, inviting participants to explore the relationship between inner and outer worlds, and between the conscious and the subconscious.
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