Somatic Storytelling + Archiving Workshop was a collaborative arts education project co-facilitated by experienced teaching artists Riley Cavanaugh and Cristina Leoni-Osion. It combined somatic movement, music, and visual art with digital storytelling and archiving, offering students multiple ways to express themselves beyond language. The project was designed for the Willkommenklassen at the Ruth-Cohn-School in Berlin, engaging students aged 16–21 who have recently arrived from Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Through movement, sound, visual media, and film, the students explored personal and collective autobiographical stories surrounding identity, memory, and resilience. Before the week long intensive project week, we met with the students to learn about their curiosities and see which kind of activities and topics they responded to the most.

Each day during the week-long intensive, the teaching artists proposed an autobiographical theme or impulse, meant to spark a particular personal history, sensation, or statement from the students. The students then responded to this impulse with a medium of their choice: film, sound, image, or dance, either individually or in small groups. After collecting these artistic and creative responses, short films, artworks, and/or dances, we then collectively curated, a mixed media group presentation centered on the themes that resonated most with them, giving their voices, perspectives, and creative processes value and visibility to their peers, teachers, and the wider Berlin public.

Below is an edited version of the final presentation that respects the students privacy and identities.