Communal laboratory, creative inquiry, ritual and magic.
You Are Invited.
From November 1st, 2021 until March 31st, 2022 we are holding a deep-dive winter residency on the island of Samothraki in Greece. This is not a course, a workshop, or a class. It is a laboratory for our minds, hearts, bodies, and souls. We inquire about community living and co-creation. We aim to translate our findings into concrete action. How does Life want to express through a group that is willing to offer themselves to each other and Love? How do we create when we get out of the way and support the natural unfolding of our fullest expression?
The Winter Residency rests on three pillars
Co-Creative Expression
We bring our arts, mastery, and beginner’s mind to the co-creative process of our time, projects, art, music, food, movement, writing, eros, and craft.
Community Research and Experimentation
We live in a cauldron to experiment with and research community tools and practices in a self-responsible and sacred container.
Sacredness and Ritual Magic
We follow no particular religion or dogma. Yet we go deep into spiritual practice, ritual magic, and shamanic connection.
The uniting fabric of these three pillars is the utopian vision of the world we want to live for. We transcend our dreams into a lived experience. In a space that serves as a laboratory for all aspects of the culture we long for: living and loving in community, expressing creatively together, reaching for Truth in our actions and relations, honouring sacredness, inviting ecstasy, play, magic, silence, and beauty.
What wants to be birthed?
Through you and us?
In each moment, during these winter months, and in the years to come?
Samothraki
… is an island with a rich history of ancient initiations and rituals.
We are following the footsteps of the ages past while striding forward in time on our own paths - humble and daring, loving and truthful, listening to Life and living fully.
The island calls us to bring our visions, wisdom, knowledge, art, and love into manifest form.
It calls us and our beating hearts.
The residency is an invitation to move in synergy with Samothraki and her people. Release all your ideas of “how island life should be” before you enter the ferry. In winter, the island population is small, a different pace compared to the summer season. We don’t come here to colonize the land or each other. We humbly arrive at the island, meet her treasures, inhabitants, and the ancient and recent culture to listen and move in synergy. With her resources, her spirits, her potential, and her longings.
Who Is The Residency For?
The residency is not a training but a lived experience.
This means anyone joining needs to be aware of their own emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. You need to know how to (co)regulate in an environment and group that goes deep into all aspects of Life, Love, Co-Creation, Spirit, and Community.
We invite residents who have experienced and explored community, co-creation, alternative relationships and love structures before.
Ideally, you are already connected through our extended network of the Highden Soul Tribe, ISTA, Shamballa School, the Temple Collective, Tamera, or have been part of or lived with similar groups and organizations.
We bring our mastery, crafts, curiosity, and the will to learn to this time together to let art emerge through us. Ideally, you already have a preferred form of creative expression (whichever this might be) and are committed to learn and grow.
Each resident commits for a six weeks stay or longer. This allows us to develop and deepen our relationships and practices together.
In February, we are open for visitors from the 1st to the 21st.
Hearing the call? Send us a message or send your info via the forms below so we can talk further to see if there is a fit for you to join us.
A Place for Communal Inquiry
How do we want to sustainably live in community? What are the tools to foster depth of connection, collective visioning, conflict resolution, distribution of power and money, and mutual support to grow together and lift each other up?
We use this time as a research cauldron - a scientific approach in a lived community.
A Place for Co-Creative Expression
Expression is sacred. Art can have many forms. Creating together enables more - wonder, beauty, truth, power… We are explicitly inviting artists and creators of all disciplines to come together. To create not only side by side but with each other. Enriching our work, our visions, our expressions. Mixing our magic into new and unexpected outcomes. We invite and encourage unlimited versions of what “creativity” can look like - an album of music and spoken words, a cookbook, a life dedicated to permaculture, a stone mandala, a simple meal, a clothing line, a dance. Dream wild. Bring your gift. Discover yourself anew through witnessing the others in their art. Let’s learn and teach one another. Let’s create. And let that creation be love.
A Place for Sacredness and Ritual
What It Means To Join
Daily Community Life
When you join the Winter Residency as a resident or visitor, you commit to actively take part in our communal life. This includes the practical parts of living together - cooking, cleaning, caring for our space - as well as joining and serving in temples, rituals, and group inquiry.
The space and time is self-catered and self-organized. We will hold spaces, rituals, and workshops for each other - and we will also clean, cook, and wash together.
Cost
We want to make the Winter Residency as financially accessible as possible - while living comfortably together. Your financial contribution for housing and food will vary depending on your length of stay and type of accommodation. The overall residency is planned to be “at cost” - covering our expenses.
Daily room rates vary from 30-45 Euros (excluding food).
Daily food contribution is around 10 Euros.
For residents/long-term stay the room rates are between 350-500 Euros. Depending on the room and if it is shared.
Residents and Visitors
We welcome visitors during specific times of the Winter Residency. Outside of visiting times and offered retreats we live, create, and experiment with the resident group only.
If you want to visit us, please reach out so we can tune in if there is a fit for our group process and what the best time would be.
Location
We are excited to call one of the hotels of Samothraki, directly at the beach, our home during the winter.
We are renting the complete hotel with 12 rooms and 38 beds over winter and will have the whole space to ourselves. This allows us to cater to our own needs in a communal setting, using all the rooms and open spaces of the hotel as our temple and creative area.
The exact location will be shared with confirmed residents and visitors.
Who is Organizing?
The Samothraki Winter Residency was originally birthed between Philip Stehlik and Lena Bumke. If you are reading this, you are probably connected to either one of them already. Their personal drive and inquiry for communal experimentation, soul-based culture, creative expression, and Love motivate the manifestation of this residency. Both of them have a deep connection to Highden Soul Tribe, the International School of Temple Arts, the Berlin community, different Womxn and Men’s circles, and the island of Samothraki. Find out more about Philip here and Lena here.
If you feel called to be part of the journey and have questions, reach out to us or simply apply here.