Food, Land and Ancestral Memory

Name: Food, Land and Ancestral Memory
Start: 2025-12-20T09:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-12-20T12:30:00+00:00
Location: Humayun's Tomb Museum

Schedule

Sat Dec 20 2025 at 09:30 am to 12:30 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Humayun's Tomb Museum | New Delhi, DL

Art hoursAcross cultures, food is one of the deepest carriers of identity. A single aroma can summon a place, a person, or a season; a recipe can hold generations of memory. The act of cooking — grinding, stirring, tasting, waiting — becomes a form of storytelling passed hand to hand, often long before it is ever written down. Through flavours, smells, and textures, communities record migration, belonging, and relationships with the land.In this workshop with Dr. Sneha Rooh, participants are invited to explore their food memories as pathways to ancestry and self. The session begins by returning to the senses — recalling a dish that roots us, the person who first prepared it, the tree or landscape associated with its origin — and noticing how these memories travel through the body. Food becomes more than nourishment; it becomes an emotional map linking past and present.Participants then translate these memories into symbolic fabric collages. Using colour, texture, and motif, they create tactile representations of ingredients, gestures, rituals, and stories connected to their culinary heritage. Rather than literal illustrations, these fabric pieces act as small archives — tender reminders of home, loss, celebration, or care. Each collage becomes a soft-held memory, stitched together through intuition and story.The workshop culminates in a quiet offering at a tree, echoing traditions where trees served as witnesses to family rituals, seasonal rhythms, and everyday life. By tying their fabric memories to the branches, participants honour the intimate connections between food, land, and those who nurtured them, creating a collective act of remembrance rooted in stillness and respect.Audience Takeaways:* Explore sensory memory as a doorway into personal and ancestral stories* Understand food as a carrier of cultural identity, migration, and belonging* Create symbolic fabric collages inspired by recipes, ingredients, and home traditions* Reflect on the historical relationship between land, trees, and everyday culinary practices* Participate in a collective ritual honouring memory, place, and shared heritageArtist Bio Dr. Sneha Rooh is an art-based therapist and socially engaged arts practitioner whose work weaves somatic wisdom, feminist praxis, and ecological consciousness into participatory and performative experiences. Drawing from a rich background in medicine, clinical psychology, and arts-based therapy, her interdisciplinary practice transforms embodied memory, menstrual narratives, grief, and queer identity into sites of resistance, healing, and storytelling.Over the past decade, Sneha has facilitated community-centred projects across India, ranging from the long-running Menstrual Memory Theatre with Orikalankini to grief and identity explorations through Red Door’s Compassion & Resilience Fellowship. Her interventions often take the form of image theatre, sculpture, movement-based rituals, ecological art-making, and collective voice work. She has worked extensively with prisons, juvenile homes, schools, activist circles, and public spaces, creating environments where participants can reclaim agency through creative expression.Recent projects include Transient Life at the India Habitat Centre (2024), an interdisciplinary monthly series on mortality and meaning-making, and participatory feminist mural installations at Lamakaan, Hyderabad (2022). Her practice is grounded in a trauma-informed, intersectional lens, integrating her training in Theatre of the Oppressed, Integral Somatic Psychotherapy, Narrative Practices, and Queer Affirmative Counselling.Across her work, Dr. Rooh remains committed to art as communal medicine—an invitation to witness, remember, and reimagine the body as a living archive of resilience.This workshop accompanies Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, the first major National Museum of Australia exhibition to tour India, presented in partnership with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, at the Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site Museum.