The audio-visual workshop held at Eliezer Joldan Memorial College, Leh brought together enthusiastic youth from across Ladakh, including its most remote and isolated areas. It was conducted between 21 July, 2025 to 02 August, 2025 and mentored by filmmaker Akash Basumatari. 

Historically, many Himalayan and tribal regions have been represented through the gaze of outsiders including researchers, filmmakers, travelers, or development practitioners. It has often resulted in simplified or romanticised portrayals that overlook local complexity. 

Community-driven media is a powerful approach that places the tools and authority of storytelling directly in the hands of communities. Rather than being passive subjects interpreted through an external lens, people become active authors of their own narratives. This approach is particularly significant in culturally rich societies like Ladakh, where knowledge, memory, and identity are traditionally transmitted orally through storytelling and lived experience. By creating their own media, communities reclaim the power to define the complexities around identity, articulate priorities, and influence public discourse.

In this roundtable, six visiting women artists from across the Himalayas explored profound connections between nature, human-made materials, and storytelling, weaving together themes of ecology, emotion, and feminism. Participants shared how working together and telling stories through art helped them connect with both the environment and deeper personal experiences. Using natural materials, the artists highlighted environmental concerns while also exploring emotional and gendered perspectives.

The artists approached ecology not as a scientific subject, but as a living, emotional, and ancestral practice. Their work focused on identity, memory, and community, often using materials like upcycled fabrics or foraged natural items. These materials, having ‘lived once,’ were given new life through the art, reflecting the idea of transformation and reuse. 

Samira Patel’s talk focused on climate change and migration in Changthang, drawing deeply from her personal experiences working with communities whose realities are often overlooked in policy discussions. She has witnessed firsthand how formal systems frequently exclude the most vulnerable people. While earth observation satellites and large climate data infrastructures offer important global insights, they often fail to capture the lived, everyday knowledge held by those on the ground. 

Through her work, which is rooted in ethnography, environmental anthropology, STS (science technology studies), and geographies of knowledge, she aims to bring these culturally grounded understandings of climate into the policymaking process. Samira emphasised that climate change and migration are frequently treated as national security concerns, which can overshadow the subtler, place-based realities of how these processes actually unfold. She argued for a more nuanced policy approach that recognises small-scale, gradual movements of people, animals, and ecosystems.

This exhibition is the result of a indigenous sheep wool pre-processing workshop held in Chibra, Changthang, followed by a felting workshop at Palay House, Phey. All items on display were made within just five days with the wool sourced in Chibra. The products used wool in its natural, undyed shades, reflecting their authentic character. 

While most livelihood initiatives in Ladakh focus on weaving, felting remains an important yet underutilised skill with significant potential to benefit pastoral communities. The main goal of this exhibition is to demonstrate the potential of felting as a livelihood opportunity in Ladakh.

The workshops brought together youth and women from the Kargyam and Puga regions of Changthang, whose enthusiastic participation led to the creation of these products.  

In her talk on wool interventions in Ladakh, senior textile designer and wool expert Jigisha Patel shared insights from her long engagement with pastoral communities in the Changthang region. She also spoke about the 2025 wool workshops held in Chibra and Phey, which helped deepen the understanding of local practices.

She explained how seasonal patterns guided the entire sheep-wool cycle. Shearing and sorting depend strongly on the weather, and nomadic families use their own tacit knowledge to decide the right time. By observing the growth of wool and hair on sheep and goats, they intuitively choose when shearing should begin. It usually starts at the end of June, but if the weather stays cool, it may shift to the first week of July or even later.

Jigisha acknowledged the practical challenges in the region, including the movement of pastoral households, limited facilities, and the need for steady coordination. At the same time, she pointed to the strong potential for community-led wool development in Changthang. By aligning improved techniques with the natural rhythms of nomadic life, she hopes to help create new possibilities for sheep wool. 

Filmmaker Akash Basumatari curated two powerful films (produced by SPS Community Media) for this screening followed by a discussion at Palay House in Phey, illustrating the depth of grassroots storytelling:

1. Jowar Gatha (The Story of Jowar/Sorghum): A film that explores the revival of Jowar, foregrounding issues of food sovereignty, traditional farming knowledge, and the preservation of indigenous crops.

2. Gaar (Hailstorm): A stark and intimate account of climate vulnerability, documenting the impact of erratic hailstorms on farming livelihoods and the community’s strategies of resilience.

These works capture authentic, micro-level socio-economic realities with nuance and clarity.

Community media, shaped through collective participation, transfers narrative power from elite institutions to the communities long excluded from mainstream storytelling. It ensures that marginalised communities are not merely subjects of outside reporting but the primary authors of their own stories. When media is owned and controlled by the community it serves, it becomes a platform for local issues, grounded perspectives, and lived realities. At its core, community media is about self-representation and democratic participation, transforming media into a tool for empowerment and social change.

Climate scientist Dr. Chirag Dhara delivered a talk on updated climate-impact assessment for India with a special focus on the Himalayan region. He explained that although not uniform, the Himalayas are now warming faster than global average, and this rapid temperature rise is reshaping both landscapes and livelihoods. Glaciers are losing mass, snowlines are shifting upward, and many glacial lakes are becoming increasingly unstable. These changes raise long-term concerns about water security while simultaneously increasing the risk of sudden, high-impact events such as glacial lake outburst floods.

He explained that the Indian monsoon, already complex, is becoming more erratic under current climate trends. Even years with normal or above-normal total rainfall now show far more extreme, short-duration downpours interspersed with long dry spells. In the Himalayan region, this shift has sharply increased incidents of cloudbursts, landslides, and flash floods. He discussed in particular the patterns that lead up to these extreme weather events, showing how a combination of warming, moisture surges, and local topography can trigger devastating flash floods.

In response, he called for a shift toward anticipatory, community-centred adaptation. This includes strengthening early-warning systems for flash floods, improving slope and watershed management, and integrating scientific monitoring with local knowledge. He emphasised that resilience in the Himalayan region will depend on solutions that are grounded in the lived realities of mountain communities.