The Shape of What We Carry

Building on visuals collected through somatic body mapping and on joint exercises, participants translate marks, textures, symbols, and bodily sensations into a shared woodcut composition. Through visual experimentation and carving, they explore how personal bodily experiences and emotions can take shape in a collective piece. The facilitators show how the organic lines of the wood, its grain and its irregularities, can mirror and express somatic experience.

The process brings individual experiences into dialogue without reducing them to a single narrative. It draws on recurring patterns and points of connection while preserving the distinct gestures, symbols, and visual languages that participants contributed during the somatic workshop.

Questions that run through the whole project guide the carving as well. How does exhaustion live in the body, and where do we find spaces of vitality, resistance, and rest? How do our lived experiences manifest in our bodies and movements? And how could we create space for bodies to exist beyond the demand for constant productivity imposed on them?

Participants can drop in and out over the course of the weeks to carve this collective somatic landscape, an artistic expression of both the pressures placed on bodies and the resources through which people sustain themselves and one another.

The workshop is open to women* with migration experience, with or without an artistic background. Taking part in the previous somatic workshop series is encouraged but not required.

The finished woodcut will be printed live at the opening of the Times in Common space on December 5, 2026, and will remain part of the space until spring 2027. 

The workshops will be facilitated by Salma Abudagga and Jocelyn Casarrubias.