Stories We Hear About Our Bodies

Name: Stories We Hear About Our Bodies
Start: 2025-12-19T09:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-12-19T12:30:00+00:00
Location: Humayun's Tomb Museum

Schedule

Fri Dec 19 2025 at 09:30 am to 12:30 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Humayun's Tomb Museum | New Delhi, DL

Across cultures, the body carries more than muscle, memory, or movement — it holds the stories we inherit. From childhood onward, families, communities, and social worlds shape how we come to know ourselves: words of praise or caution, labels of strength or fragility, stories that root us or unsettle us. Over time, these narratives settle into posture, breath, gesture, and emotion, becoming quiet maps we learn to inhabit.This workshop with Dr. Sneha Rooh, invites participants to explore these intimate “body stories” through somatic awareness and fabric-based body mapping. The session unfolds gently, beginning with grounding practices that draw attention to breath, sensation, and the subtle inner landscapes we often overlook. Participants reflect on phrases and memories passed down to them — the stories that shaped confidence, created pressure, offered care, or caused rupture.Using fabric, thread, colour, and texture, each participant then creates a body map: a soft, tactile translation of where memory lives in the body. Fabric becomes metaphor, something that can be wrapped, mended, stitched, layered, or held. Through symbolic motifs and intuitive gestures, participants trace where identity has been imprinted, where hurt has been carried, and where resilience has taken root.The process is not about anatomical accuracy but about listening inwardly, acknowledging embodied history, and imagining spaces of healing and reclamation.The workshop concludes with quiet shared reflection, honouring the idea that just as landscapes hold ancestral pathways, our bodies too carry routes of memory, meaning, and transformation.Audience Takeaways- Explore how inherited stories shape body perception, identity, and emotional memory- Learn to translate sensation, memory, and narrative into symbolic fabric-based body maps- Understand the body as a site of cultural meaning, resilience, and lived experience- Engage in gentle somatic reflection to notice imprints of history and moments of strength- Experience a restorative making process that centres repair, mapping, and quiet witnessingArtist BioDr. 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.