Inhabiting Myself: The body as a territory

The idea of this workshop is born from the need to offer spaces for self-knowledge through art, for which the body cartography technique has been considered most pertinent. Body cartography integrates both the body scheme and image,understanding the first as a “fact reality” (Doltó, 1986, p. 18), that is to say,the tangible–physical characteristics–, while the body image is the “living synthesis of our emotional experiences” (Doltó, 1986, p. 21), in other words,intangible-inconsistent.Moving on with Doltó(1986), the body is understood as an “organized mediator between the subject and the world”, in which the emotions and thoughts occur. Hence, the maps allow us to work not only in the tangible territory, but also with the memories the body holds and how we depict them, to then give them meaning and integrate them consciously, aiming towards a comprehension of our biographic history to be able to rebuild meanings that orient us towards self-knowledge and well-being. Sofía Fuentes (2018) sustains that the cartography allows us to position ourselves in our place in society and helps us discover new spaces, new ways of seeing and understanding ourselves, as well as to play with the possibility of creating new ways of portraying ourselves before others and giving new symbols to our body.Parting from this, this Art Therapy workshop emerges, with an eclectic multimodal approach (López, 2009), in which we will work on dynamics of body interaction, the space and the other, as well as the enquiry through visual language. As a result, the participants will discover new ways of understanding their body, relating to it and bonding and interacting with others; giving special attention to the creative process and how to read the final production of each participant.