A life shaped through art

I started painting when I was growing up in Turin, Italy. My family situation was very modest, quite poor. My father was a train driver, and my mother worked at home. They were totally communist, so luckily I grew up without the baggage of being Catholic, which is almost compulsory in Italy – but even communism is a type of religion. It was quite a liberal background, but not artistic. My father was pushing me to become an engineer. It was not possible for me, so I went to art school. That was the time Arte Povera was happening, where you made art from what you found. Now it’s called recycling. So I was going to the daily market to pick up cartons and tubes to make sculptures and so on. Then I went by chance – if there is such a thing in life as chance – to Turkey, and met people coming and going from India. So I went to India, and then everything changed in my life.

When I arrived in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, something blew my mind. It was a totally new field and it was so rich and full of art that I wanted to soak it up. Watching pujas and talking with the boatmen on the Ganga about philosophy – that was incredible for me.

So I started to study philosophy, Vedas, everything. My first book was by Sri Aurobindo – which I didn’t understand at all.

India and antiques

I wanted to travel in India and understand more, and I felt that when you travel with a purpose, you enter into the tissue and the fabric of society. So I saw the possibility of buying and selling antiques, and I became one of the first dealers in Asiatic art and antiquities in the late 1960s. It just happened – often we take decisions that are not very conscious.

I was lucky enough to find fantastic pieces, and I started to connect with museum curators in Italy, and they guided me a bit, because they saw I had a good nose for buying the right things. One curator of the anthropology museum in Turin bought all my collections and opened the door for me to the biggest collectors of antique Asiatic art in the city. So I was quite lucky.

I had a second wife by then, Liliana, and we both had kids from previous relationships. She was in fashion, and was also a traveler with the same interests. So we were traveling in India, Indonesia and Pakistan, making containers of furniture and antiques, and selling them in Italy. On each trip, we’d set aside 15 days to travel and gain knowledge. Liliana discovered Auroville through reading Mother’s Agenda, and said ‘Let’s go’. I thought it was part of the Ashram, and I wasn’t interested because I had been in a Zen monastery in Italy and I had entered deeply into Buddhism and had my own way of meditating. But when we arrived in Auroville, I understood, first, that it was not an ashram and, secondly, I was totally blown away by the nature. Then I started to understand the project of Auroville.

We’d passed our lives trying to work in a different way: I was a total anarchist, and had always tried to use my political understanding in my work and relations with people. Coming here, I was touched by the project on human unity, plus it was an adventure. Liliana and I realized we were in the same boat – we both wanted to come and be here. This was about 24 years ago.

In Italy we had a very big organization: we had twenty people working with us in antiques and fashion, and we were doing big expositions in Europe. We struggled for a couple of years to find someone else to take over the business, but it was difficult because it was big money. So, after a couple of years of visiting Auroville and being excited about moving here, we sat together, and said, “Is the money from selling the business that important, or is what we want to do more important?” So we decided to give everything to the people working with us, and we went! In Pondy, we met Santo at the Auroville Boutique, and he helped us. He brought us to Sharnga and said, “This is the right place for you.” We stayed there for two years. We didn’t want to get into the housing story then. At that time, you couldn’t become an Aurovilian if you bought a house – the exact opposite of now! We had a bit of a clash with the Entry Service, and so we did two years of being Newcomers. During that time, we taught art to children in New Creation School.

After a while, we realized that Auroville needed money, and that we knew how to do business, so we decided to go back into business but in a different way. We created the fashion and jewelry unit, Miniature. The name is not accidental. I wanted to remind my wife to keep the business small! So, I started doing jewelry again. Jewelry is connected with my spirit. Liliana does the fashion side of the business – she’s the mother of it.

Stimulating the arts in Auroville

At one point, I started curating for Auroville artists who needed support. I was also doing installations and my own paintings. Then, about ten years ago, the new cinema was almost completed. I was inspired by the love affair with cinema that I’d shared with my grandparents as a kid, so I said, “I’ll run the auditorium!” Since then, I’ve been running the Multi-Media Centre – Cinema Paradiso (MMC–CP) with Nina. Ramesh is there every night to oversee, and, along with other people, helps to curate films from different parts of the world.

In 2009, MMC/CP started the Auroville Film Festival as a platform for movies made by people in Auroville. This year will be its fifth edition. When it started, it was really Auroville-centric. Later, we realized we needed to include films from all over the world on the theme of human unity. But at that time no one was really making films about human unity! Now, after three festivals on that theme, people are starting to think about it, and we have movies coming from all over the world. We also have relations with other film festivals. This year, I will present an Auroville film at Italy’s oldest environmental film festival, Cinemambiente, and they will present their films at our film festival. It’s a stimulating exchange.

One reflection the Film Festival group had was that we’re constantly exposed to images, but how many of us know the power of the image? The media can change people’s ideas through images – they are so important. So, Sasikant and Tom started to teach the children how to create images and films. One girl said, “After doing the workshop, now I see movies through different eyes.”

In 2010, a group of us started the Art Service to develop the arts in Auroville. There are four executives: me, Renu, Pushkar and Ramesh. Krishna is my partner in most of this work, and Miniature financially supports these activities.

The motivation to start the Art Service came from my exhausting experiences on the Auroville Council and the Working Committee. I was concerned that this city would be built by bureaucrats and politicians who don’t have any artistic ideas. Society generally doesn’t care about art, because art doesn’t produce money, and there’s an obsession with money. Art is seen as the salad that you put around the bureaucratic, political, economic aspect, to make it a bit nicer. Yet art is so important and necessary when you’re doing spiritual research, for example to discover the essence of beauty, and this is very important in building our city.

As part of the Art Services’ activities, we publish MAgzAV magazine, which is informed by the question, “If we’re going to express or create a new culture in Auroville, what is it?” Every edition has a different theme. The most recent edition focused on the ‘elephant in the room’, the problems we don’t want to talk about. This issue was censored to a certain extent. It included an image that suggested an elephant was stuck in the Matrimandir. This was removed from copies sold at the Visitors Centre, apparently because of cultural sensitivities. But why are we so sensitive about critique and satire? I think we don’t have the right to control anything – people, images, places. If you control, immediately you kill the point of being here in Auroville, which is to explore and find our way. I’m not looking for provocation. I’m looking for discussion.

Art always has to pose questions – across different fields, and also to question what we are doing here. Johnny staged a satirical play last week and hundreds of people went, so there’s a role for satire in Auroville. What sort of community will we have if we can’t do these things?

Personal art

In my first 20 years in Auroville, I had a couple of photo exhibitions, such as documentations of the Edyanchavady fire festival and of Italy. I was involved in so many things, I didn’t exhibit my paintings. For example, we organized a big arts exhibition of Auroville artists in Delhi five years ago, and then another one in Chennai, and we got the chance to present a lot of Auroville artists there.

Then, at the last film festival, I did an installation of a boat. More recently, I organized the first exhibition of my own paintings, on the theme of ‘mothers’. I had two mothers. My mother died when I was ten years old after years in the hospital, so it was very painful for her and for me. And then, luckily my father had a second wife who brought me up, and so I had a second mother and a second chance. So, for me, the mother aspect is important and I collect mother figures from every culture.

As an artist, I have only ever worked in abstract forms, never figuratively. Then suddenly something changed, and I painted a form of Kali, and then I started to paint mothers, using clashing bright colors that give a particular vibration.

For a recent group exhibition, Audrey wanted to feature six artists with different ideas about patterns, to present different ways of working. In Tai Chi, I always teach people to be careful of getting trapped in patterns. As human beings, a pattern means something that’s comfortable for you but you need to stop to examine your fears. So I used this idea to paint seven pieces that were all completely different and this opened different ways of thinking and working for me. I like to stretch into new territory because life is very short.

Tai Chi

Tai Chi is another big part of my life related to my spiritual and philosophical research. I was in a Zen monastery when I was very young, and I learned breathing techniques, concentration and meditation, and that’s something that’s part of my daily routine. When we arrived in Auroville, we started to follow Mauna’s teaching of the form of Tai Chi called The Inner Way, from master Vlady Stevanovitch. And then I went to France where I did intensive study with him for six hours a day.

After a few years, Mauna and others pushed me to teach, and I’m happy that they did because teaching is the best way to learn. I’ve been teaching Tai Chi for more than 15 years now and the more you go into it, the more you discover. I train between 200 and 400 people a year, and five or six have become teachers. It’s a fantastic sense of satisfaction and it’s nice to see people discovering that breathing will change their life.

Family and the future

My son and daughter visited Auroville a few times, and my daughter has been living here for six years. She is very happy. She is working with Liliana in Miniature and has two boys who are going to school. I’m very happy to have part of the family here. Liliana’s son came several times, and now he’s a Newcomer. Like many families in Auroville, we are a magnet to attract other family members to come.

I sing in the choir, and so do my daughter and grandson. At the last choir performance three generations of our family were singing – it’s very touching, as I love to sing.

Auroville will continue to grow. And Auroville artists like me need to be confronted with art from the rest of the world, and to find solutions that are appropriate to Auroville. We can’t just reflect what is happening in the rest of the world, with its concerns about money. There are a lot of possibilities here, it’s always exciting.