Art of Ritual Residency:
Shadow Work
&
Creative Rebirth
Photography by Lucila Vairo 2025
Come and join us from the 24th - 31st of July 2026 for a transformative, artistic week around the theme of Shadow Work and Creative Rebirth with Sylvie Barbier (Ritual artist and co-founder of Life Itself) and Kay Michael (ecological artist and co-founder of Letters to the Earth), two female leaders powerfully alchemising art and eco-spirituality at the Life Itself Farmhouse Hub (Dordogne - France).
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of life, but by making the darkness conscious” - Carl Jung
What must be released for the unborn future to be born?
Our shadows are at the core of our organisations’ breakdowns, family and friendship disputes, and the disintegration of political movements. Our shadows run deep, they are at the source of wars, extraction, the killing, the revenge, the manipulation, the rape, the gossip, the suicides, the bullying, the blind eye and our lack of integrity. In a globalised world that has intimately woven us together, our different collective shadows are now screaming out.
Commitment to shadow work and loving accountability is non-negotiable if we are to bring forth the transformation our current day crises require.
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Carl Jung
During our week-long residency, we invite you to immerse yourself in the poetic and transformative terrain of shadow work, held through the vessel of ritual art.
The journey begins from a shared recognition: both of us have been shaped by lineages and personal enquiries where the unseen, the unspoken, and the unresolved have called to be honoured and transformed. Dreams, hauntings, old patterns, and ancestral echoes are not obstacles here — they are invitations.
Join us in exploring personal and collective shadow material through guided rituals/ceremonies, movement, elemental practices and artistic creation. Some rituals will be intimate and simple, others will be more collective and immersive. Throughout the week you will also have the opportunity to create your own rituals to be witnessed / experienced by the others.
It will end with an offering on the last day of the residency - Saturday 31st - at the Second Renaissance Festival (31st July-2nd of August) in the shape of performance, installations, interactive experiences, ceremony and ritual that distills the week’s work for an audience. This will mark the threshold between our inner journey and the outward celebration of the festival.
Photography by Lucila Vairo 2025
The residential holds two complementary movements:
Receiving – allowing unconscious intuitions and symbolic material to surface and guide us via dreams, artistic and somatic practices
Transmuting – activating creative life force and embodied expression as a sacred way to encounter, transform, and integrate what lies beneath the surface
Workshops will explore the following — and more:
Grief as portal: Grief is woven into the residency as a gateway to love, acceptance, and transformation — a way of honoring what has died, what is dying, and what must be let go for new life to emerge.
Sound as presence and activation: Sound and song as a way to tune into the field, release emotion, and call in energy.
Movement and embodiment: Awakening our body as a canvas and vessel for animality and deep wisdom
Spoken word as an access: poetry, rap, prayer, myth, dramatic text.
Land based ritual: tapping into ancient and ancestral memories within us and in connection with the Earth.
In the midst of shadow and death, something new wants to be born. This is the art of birthing an emerging dream. Together we are offering a place for the past, present and future to be witnessed, released and reclaimed.
The intention is not to “resolve” the shadow, but to enter into a relationship with it—to let it teach, awaken, and reshape us.
Photography by Vladyslav Chabanenko
Who is it for?
This residency is for anyone who feels the quiet pull toward ritual—whether or not they call themselves an artist or walk a spiritual path. It welcomes all committed hearts from: dancers, writers, dreamers, performers, painters, musicians, makers, visual artists and those simply curious about the deeper currents within themselves. It is for those who long to step into ritual space, to listen for the ceremonies that live inside them, to awaken the oracular body, to open an energetic field together, and to train the body to become a vessel of ritual in communion with others.
Note: This is not a therapeutic retreat, although the process can be deeply therapeutic. It’s an artistic and spiritual experiment in collective ritual creation. Each participant is responsible for their own physical and mental wellbeing at all times.
BIO
Sylvie ‘Shiwei’ Barbier is a French-Taiwanese visionary artist, curator, and co-founder of Life Itself. Her work focuses on transformational art that integrates Eastern and Western philosophies. Trained in performance art, design, facilitation, and anthroposophic pedagogy, she has spoken at leading institutions including Harvard, TEDx, Polimoda and IED. Over the past two decades, Sylvie has developed methodologies for transformational art and has led rituals in galleries, public spaces, retreat centers, churches, natural landscapes, and educational institutions.
She is the author of The Art of the Second Renaissance manifesto and Editor of Second Renaissance Magazine. Her work contributes to building a cultural movement dedicated to practical actions for a wiser, weller future.
Sylvie is also a mother of two and is committed to bridging ancestral Indigenous knowledge with contemporary and future-oriented perspectives.
Kay Michael is a London-based theatre-maker, creative producer, and ecological facilitator. She creates and guides cultural experiences for personal and collective transformation in theatres, streets, woodlands, galleries, festivals, and retreat centres.
Trained at Drama Centre London, Kay has developed award-winning new writing and devised performances. Since 2014 her work has centred on cultural and community responses to the planetary crisis. As a co-founder of Culture Declares Emergency, she has produced Cultural Climate Assemblies for the Roundhouse, Central St Martins, and the Southbank Centre, and led major festivals featuring hundreds of environmental artists, including Extinction Underground at the Vaults and the youth-led Arcadia at Stanley Arts.
A facilitator of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, Kay co-produced and curated the first Council of All Beings for global delegates at COP26. Her practice is shaped by training in permaculture, ecopsychology, and deep nature connection.
Kay is also the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Letters to the Earth, an award-winning global creative organisation fostering connection with nature through outdoor immersions, creative writing, and storytelling campaigns. She co-designs all programmes, leads artistic partnerships, co-edited the organisation’s book, and is the lead artist for its theatrical adaptation. She has presented at COP26, COP27, London Climate Action Week, and the Net Zero Festival.
In winter, she can often be found planting trees across the UK or spending time in her motherland, Scotland.
Pricing
The residency will be an intimate one with 15 resident.
The full 7-day workshop from 24th-31st July costs €680.
We also offer three discounted spot at €360 for those for whom cost is a barrier—please get in touch if you’d like to apply.
Note: Accomodation is seperate
Schedule
Note: Schedule is still under revision. Below is indicative and subject to change.
☽ FRIDAY – 24th July ARRIVAL & OPENING
- 3PM-5:30PM- Arrival & settling in
- 6:30 PM – Dinner
- 8:30-10PM – Opening Circle / Functioning
- 10PM– & Noble Silence begins
☼ SATHURDAY, SUNDAY, MONDAY – 25, 26, 27 July
- 8:00 AM – Silent Breakfast
- 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM– Morning Workshop
- 13:00- 2:30 PM – Lunch
- 2:30 – 5:30 PM – Afternoon Workshop
- 6:30 PM – Dinner
- 8:30-9h30:PM – Sharing Circle /and or Meditation
- 10PM – & Noble Silence begins
☼ TUESDAY – 28th July
Lazy day
9:00-11PM– night Workshop
☼ WEDNESDAY– 29th July
Lazy Morning
- 2:30 - 5:30 PM – Afternoon Workshop
- 6:30 PM – Dinner
- 9:00-10:15PM– Sharing Circle & Meditation
- 10:30 PM – & Noble Silence begins
☼ THURSDAY – 30th July
- 8:00 AM – Breakfast
- 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM – Morning Workshop
PREPARATION FOR OFFERING
☼ FRIDAY – 31st July Ritual OFFERING @Second Renaissance Festival