ISCHELIU 2026 the Open call is open till July 1st
ISCHELIU / RICHIAMO 2026
Fifth Edition
To relaunch our membership campaign, DisterraUS will offer one round-trip direct Delta flight New York–Olbia–New York to one active member selected through the Ischeliu / Richiamo 2026 open call.
A residency for artists and creatives who carry a deep connection to Sardinia — a bond shaped by diaspora, held in family memory, and passed down through stories, images, languages, gestures, and forms of belonging lived across distance.
Rebeccu, Bonorva | September 2–10, 2026
Application deadline: July 1, 2026 Application form
There is a profound connection between migration, art, and memory. Those who leave Sardinia — and those who inherit it through family history — carry with them a complex relationship to origin: a language heard from afar, landscapes passed down in fragments, stories, silences, images, gestures, songs, scents, and words left suspended.
It is within this distance that art can become a call. Not nostalgia, but a space for re-reading, transformation, and return. Through writing, sound, voice, body, and image, Sardinian identity can re-emerge as living matter: questioned by the present and opened to new forms.
Founded in 2022 and developed by 369gradi with the support of Fondazione di Sardegna, Ischeliu / Richiamo now reaches its fifth edition. In 2026, the residency becomes the opening threshold of Grazia Ritrovata, a special project recognized by the Italian Ministry of Culture and dedicated to the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Grazia Deledda — the only Italian woman to have received the world’s highest literary honor to date.
To begin with Ischeliu means entering the deepest core of Deledda’s recognition: her ability to transform Sardinia into universal literary matter. The Nobel citation celebrates her work for its vivid representation of life on her native island and, at the same time, for giving voice to universal human questions. In the Nobel presentation speech, this bond between the writer and her homeland is described as a true “discovery of Sardinia”: not simply a geographical setting, but a living, spiritual, psychological, and human landscape.
For this reason, Ischeliu — a residency for artists and creatives who carry a deep connection to Sardinia, shaped by diaspora, preserved in family memory, or lived across distance — is the most coherent starting point for Grazia Ritrovata. If Deledda was able to draw from the island a voice capable of speaking to the world, Ischeliu invites Sardinian artists and descendants today to revisit that same relationship from another perspective: that of those who carry Sardinia with them, inherit it, piece it together through fragments, listen to it from afar, and transform it into new artistic material.
The residency will weave together voice, writing, live electronics, moving images, soundscape, and performative practices, building a dialogue with the territory understood as a living body.
At the center of the work will be the wind: a natural and symbolic presence that runs through Deledda’s imagination and the Sardinian landscape. The wind calls, separates, presses, resists, transforms. It will be approached as both poetic force and research material, connecting body, voice, landscape, memory, and movement.
The residency will activate performative, sonic, visual, narrative, and relational devices capable of moving through Rebeccu, the landscapes of Meilogu and Logudoro, natural paths, sites of memory, ancestral stones, sacred places, archaeological traces, and the Domus de Janas, recognized by UNESCO in 2025 as World Heritage.
Who can apply
The call is open to artists and creatives who carry a deep connection to Sardinia: a bond shaped by diaspora, held in family memory, and passed down through stories, images, languages, gestures, and forms of belonging lived across distance.
Participants must:
live outside Sardinia, either in Italy or abroad;
work in the fields of performance, writing, sound, music, visual arts, film, video, photography, artistic research, or interdisciplinary practices.
No specialized knowledge of Grazia Deledda’s work is required. What is required is a willingness to enter a shared research process, open to listening, to the relationship with the territory, to family and collective memory, and to artistic experimentation.
Residency period and location
The residency will take place from September 2 to September 10, 2026, in Rebeccu, in the Municipality of Bonorva, Sardinia.
Selected participants will be hosted in the spaces of Rebeccu Arte e Ospitalità and will take part in activities of research, listening, territorial exploration, writing, sound composition, performative practice, and final sharing.
What will be developed during the residency
During the residency, participants will be invited to produce both personal and collective materials: notes, texts, sound traces, images, performative actions, narrative fragments, and dramaturgical materials.
The process will be oriented toward the creation of a shared artistic path, capable of generating signs, materials, and collective forms. As in previous editions, Ischeliu aims to leave a living trace: a collective and participatory work born from the encounter between personal experience, memory, territory, and contemporary artistic languages.
How to apply
To apply, candidates must submit the application form by July 1, 2026.
Selection
Up to ten participants will be selected. The selection will take into account the quality of the applicant’s artistic path, motivation, willingness to work within a collective and multidisciplinary context, and the direct or inherited relationship with Sardinia.
Release form
In case of selection, participants will be asked to sign a release form authorizing 369gradi to use images, video recordings, voice recordings, sound materials, texts, works, and artistic materials created or collected during the residency, exclusively for purposes connected to the documentation, communication, promotion, archiving, dissemination, and public presentation of Ischeliu / Richiamo 2026 and the special project Grazia Ritrovata.
Credits
Ischeliu / Richiamo 2026 is a project by 369gradi, with the support of Fondazione di Sardegna, and is part of the 2026 Special Project Grazia Ritrovata, supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture.