SOPRA SOTTO

11/05/2026

SOPRA SOTTO’s Change Makers residency in Tuscany explored communal living, creativity, and care as practices of resistance.

Inspired by ideas from Audre Lorde, Antonio Gramsci, and Joanna Macy, the residency approached art not simply as an end goal or commodity, but as a tool to question and challenge the status quo, imagine alternative futures, and communicate new ways of being through storytelling, culture, and creative practice.

Central to the residency was the belief that artists and creatives can shape culture and inspire positive societal change through ripple effect in accordance with the idea of oneness.

Care and communal living were explored as antidotes to a hyper-productive, extractivist, and individualist society, and as essential forms of resistance and collective wellbeing.

Daily life during the residency was grounded in slowness, rest, nature, creativity, shared meals, play, and togetherness

Through resident-led workshops and shared daily life, we exchanged ideas and knowledge across disciplines while imagining futures beyond capitalism, colonialism, extractivism, heteronormativity, and human-centric systems.

We often returned to questions of embodiment, reconnecting with the self and others, collective ways of being, and traditional nature-based knowledge systems.

A recurring conversation throughout the residency was that we all hold different roles in resistance: from activists and system builders to teachers, caretakers, healers, and storytellers.

The residency’s value came from the variety of experiences and perspectives that each of the residents brought into the collective learning that emerged over the residency.

11/05/2026

Art and creativity moved through the residency as a shared language and way of learning, communicating, challenging, relating, and making sense of the world.

The focus was on the process, experiment, and play, instead of on production. Drawing, singing, dancing, cooking, storytelling, games, and conversation shaped our days, becoming ways to reflect, communicate, and connect.

Through a co-created program of workshops by and for residents, we (un)learned together through the lens of creative expression.

Next to creative workshops, we also spent time in Florence and got to visit the residency and were lucky to get a tour from the residency’s amazing curator .a .

We often returned to questions of the role of the creative or visionary in shaping culture and societal change.

We discussed how creativity opens other ways of being, where the seed of change first has to be imagined and visualized before building toward change and putting it into practice.

10/05/2026

20/03/2026

Introducing Irene Carlet as one of our residents for the upcoming Change Makers residency in April!

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.

19/03/2026

Welcoming Rachel Croning as a resident to this springs Change Makers residency in Tuscany!

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.

19/03/2026

Introducing Amy Cat as one of the residents for the upcoming Change Makers residency!

Amy (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.

27/01/2026

💛 OPEN CALL 💛

Join us this spring (5 – 19 April, 2026) in Tuscany for an interdisciplinary residency themed:

‘CHANGE MAKERS - Communal Living, Creativity and Care as Practices of Resistance’

A collective experience of shared living, workshops by/for residents, slow rhythms, time in nature, and daily life as ritual.

Art as resistance. Care as culture. Community as practice.
Process over production. Presence over pressure.
Imagining regenerative, interconnected futures together.

DETAILS
• 5–19 April 2026
• La Tegolaia, Pelago, Tuscany (IT)
• +/- 6 interdisciplinary residents
• €575 - €675 p/p (excl. travel)
• 1x scholarship position for €300 p/p
• Application deadline: 20 February 

👉 Link in bio for more info & application details!
🎉 Please share this open call in your networks!

Looking forward to receiving your applications!

23/01/2026

💫 OPEN CALL 💫

Join us this spring (5 – 19 April, 2026) in Tuscany for an interdisciplinary residency themed: ‘CHANGE MAKERS - Communal Living, Creativity and Care as Practices of Resistance’.

An intimate residency in the Italian countryside, for artists, creators, culture shapers, designers, thinkers, musicians, researchers, writers, community leaders, activists, ecologists, healers and more.

A 2-week immersive co-living experience with shared rhythms, creative exchange, collective practice, shared meals, conversations, time in nature, slowness and rest.

The framework is flexible and largely co-created, with workshops by/for residents to practice creative exchange and cross-pollination of ideas. This residency is process-based, experimental and DYI in nature.

The format is intended to provide a container to collectively examine and challenge current dominant systems, in order to imagine new narratives and explore alternative ways of being.

DETAILS

• 5–19 April 2026
• La Tegolaia, Pelago, Tuscany (IT)
• +/- 6 interdisciplinary residents
• €575 - €675 p/p (incl. stay, meals, program; excl. travel)
• 1x scholarship position for €300 p/p
• Application deadline: 20 February 

👉 Link in bio for more info & application details!

🎉 Please share this open call with creative practitioners and other culture shapes in your network!

Looking forward to receiving your applications!

28/04/2025

(3/3) A huge thanks to Alessia Pasquini ( / ) for introducing us to her connections in the Tuscan textile & fashion industries.

Alessia’s curation of the excursion program allowed us the opportunity to visit some truly inspiring circularity initiatives around Florence and Prato, and cultivate new creative connections. ❤️

During our excursions we visited:
• where surplus leather is reused to create new materials
• in Prato, a vibrant multidisciplinary textile lab and residency
• an incredible archive collection of garments and fashion magazines
• specializing in sorting garments for recycling by color and material
• where recycled materials are spun into new yarns
• showing a variety of luxury yarns and textiles made from recycled fibers
• transforming feather waste into luxury materials and yarn
• .b.london Brigitta’s creative vintage upcycling designs
• with its impressive collection of trend books and magazines

Each visit gave us a deeper understanding of how circularity is being approached behind the scenes — not just conceptually, but practically and tangibly.

📷 Emma Collins ()

28/04/2025

(2/3) The residency brought together an interdisciplinary group of creatives to explore more thoughtful forms of making in the fields of textiles, art and fashion.

We worked a lot with giving new life to discarded materials during the variety of workshops by the residents/ for the residents. 💫

Alessia Pasquini ( / ) introduced us to her research and work on biomaterials through CreativeLab, guiding us through playful a bioplastics workshop. Jess Zamora Turner () led a foraging walk to make smudge sticks from local herbs.

Jordan Hunnell () taught us creative mending techniques like sashiko, emphasizing repair and care. Andrew Veloso Watkinson () offered a meditative pattern drawing session.

Emma Collins () opened our eyes to color palettes found in the landscape, creating our own color scheme booklets. Deniz Çeliktemel () and Pearl Sijmons () collaborated on an embroidery workshop, exploring the emotional connection we have to our garments.

Lara Fank () led a session on the concept of Fashion Commoning, rethinking community within fashion. Wille-Meike Brand () organized an outdoor natural dyeing workshop with materials sourced from the kitchen and garden.

The co-created workshop program encouraged cross-pollination of ideas, hands-on learning, and exploring of new perspectives and skills.

It was an inspiring and fun approach to learning from one another — not just through talking, but through doing, making, and experimenting together.

📷 Emma Collins ()