The residencies are communal living experiences where participants use daily life as a space for inquiry into how we relate, live, and create together beyond dominant systems. Daily life centers around shared cooking and meals, time in nature, embodied practices, creative workshops, rest, occasional excursions and open dialogue.

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Each residency centers on changing overarching themes, often co-developed with a collaborator. The residency offers a framework to work with themes such as ecology, community, embodiment, collective healing, system change, and our relationship to nature, body, and spirit. 

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The content of the residency is largely shaped by the residents themselves, with a participatory structure based on a co-created workshop program. ​The residency is built by residents for residents, through cross-pollination of ideas, creative exchange, collaboration and collective experimentation.

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Creatives have the power to shape culture and narratives, influencing collective consciousness. Through ripple effect, art becomes a tool for connection, transformation, and communal healing that can inspire wider societal change. Creative expression function as means for questioning, reflection, research, and dialogue, inviting participants to challenge assumptions and explore different ways of sensing and understanding the world. Together, residents create a shared container to examine paradigms that no longer serve us and to explore how extractive systems can be reworked into more regenerative ways of being.

 

The residency prioritizes process over fixed outcomes, and exists as an ongoing experiment, offering a space for exploration, collective (un)learning, and reflection grounded in curiosity and presence.

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The name SOPRA SOTTO comes from "come sopra, così sotto", a translation of the Hermetic axiom “as above, so below”, which values interconnectedness between inner and outer worlds, individual and collective, human and more-than-human life. This philosophy informs the way the residency understands relationship, responsibility, interdependence and our place in the web of life. 

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The residency is for interdisciplinary culture shapers from a wide range of fields, including artists in different media, writers, researchers, philosophers, educators, scientists, dancers, musicians, and other creators and changemakers. It welcomes people from all backgrounds, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, religions, sexual orientations, and walks of life, and is shaped around diversity, openness, and shared learning across communities and disciplines.

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SOPRA SOTTO has been running since 2023 and is evolving toward longer-term residency programs in Sardinia from late 2026 onwards, developing a more rooted project for collective living, inquiry, and creative exchange.