Matrimandir and the Park of Unity

Two and a half years ago, Ireno Guerci presented a photo exhibition in the Unity Pavilion on ‘Matrimandir and the Park of Unity’. The photos were a selection from the many thousand photos that he has taken over the past 30 years of a place that is very close to his heart.

The Matrimandir, of course, exists in many dimensions; it is at the same time a building, a symbol, a force and an evolutionary statement. It is also richly paradoxical – a building with an overwhelming physical presence that is simultaneously a symbol of the transcendent; a transformer for a new way of being constructed of ‘old world’ materials; a ‘temple’ which eschews all elements of religion.

Ireno’s challenge was to try to capture something of these complexities on film. He did it by displaying some of the Matrimandir’s many ‘moods’: at one moment, presenting it enveloped in mist, at another as a space age transformer glittering under a starlit sky, at another capturing its emergence, like a golden promise, out of the dense red laterite. Ireno also revealed the ‘human’ face of this iconic structure through shots of the workers, of visitors with their different approaches to the structure and the gardens, and, above all, of the children who love to play in the gardens and in the vicinity of the Matrimandir.

The exhibition was very well received and now a selection of these photos, plus some new ones, have been published by SAIIER in a beautiful book, Matrimandir and the Park of Unity. As Paolo Tommasi puts it in his foreword to the book, “In this world of disorder and war, Auroville and its central zone of the Matrimandir seems a miracle. In these images one feels the hovering joy, a vibration of happiness when a dream of victory becomes reality.”

Matrimandir and the Park of Unity is a fine complement to Dominique Darr’s photo book Matrimandir – Hymn to the Builders of the Future released earlier this year.

Matrimandir and the Garden of Unity is available from Auroville outlets and from auroville.com, price Rs 1200