Reflections upon the Dreamweaving exercise

Auroville Today: The Dreamweaving process was very intense. How did you respond to the pressure?

Fabian: I think the pressure started much earlier, after the Crown walk and the different community meetings from last July onwards. I joined the Dreamweaving not only as an architect but mostly as an Aurovilian close to the Youth Centre and Bliss Forest, hoping to help find a win-win way forward. We had long – in the end fruitless – negotiations with the current ATDC, and the events of December could have ended the possibility of doing this exercise.

Then, suddenly, the whole community was behind the Dreamweaving idea, because people realised that the situation was really serious and we had to show a unified response. When we started the Dreamweaving, it was never really clear if we were functioning independently, what was the role of the community, the TDC, and the Secretary, so I think we did a really good job, both individually and as a group, by staying focused on doing what we felt was right, and not getting distracted by all these other factors. I didn’t block them out but managed to integrate them. In the end the seriousness of the situation actually pushed the creativity.

The process was complicated and challenging on an individual level. At one point, at the start of January, I was quite sick, and I feel a lot of the community is quite traumatized from the tension and the events of the last months.

Dorle: It was a rollercoaster. I felt pressure to do something that did justice to the task, which sometimes made me more determined, and sometimes it was intimidating, even a bit paralyzing, especially with the time constraints.

Neha: Each week as I worked on it there were moments when I felt crushed, and wanting to give up, but each time something within the process helped me get back on the drawing board with renewed purpose.

Ganesh: The most important thing for me was to have the safe space to do something; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to function when exposed to all the pressures.

Shailaja: The process was crushing, for sure. I fell sick for a couple of weeks; I would just get up for the next presentation, so it was really tough. But the pressure started earlier when meetings were happening all over Auroville and it was clear there were two sides. Many of us didn’t want to align with either side because such exclusivity is tragic. At that time I felt paralysed. However, when the Dreamweaving process began I felt enabled, I felt that now I had an opportunity to act, to do something meaningful. The pressure, however, was more internal, than external. The pressure to delve deeper, to work further on insights etc. in order to be relevant - week after week!

How successful was the weaving? How much did you take from others, how much were you inspired by others?

Shailaja: Many of us have been in Auroville for more than two decades so we already had ideas about the Galaxy plan and had done personal projects related to the plan. So there were a lot of ideas around, but they were at an individual level. This process helped bring them together. However, this is not a work of eight or nine weeks, and many of these ideas need more space and time to germinate.

But I was absolutely inspired by much that came up from the others, and this made me change/evolve my perspective a lot. For example, I used Ganesh’s work as the basis for what I was working on, and I changed some parts of my plans after Marie’s inputs, and inputs from the wider community.

Tanja: I only realised at the end how much the ideas and designs of Manu and myself changed over the course of this exercise. The feedback of all the participants was the main driving force for these changes. People gave us positive feedback for ideas we had just thought of but not detailed out, and this gave us the motivation to work further on them, otherwise I wouldn’t have done that.

Fabian: I always wanted to see how the Galaxy can be manifested, anchored in the context of the bioregion and the history of the last 50 years. To enable any meaningful work on the Crown - as an essential element of the Galaxy plan - I needed to focus on a key aspect of our reality today, mobility, and so the idea of connecting the Crown with the larger road network somehow clicked. As this was outside what the others were doing, there was not much that I could take from their efforts.

However, I was really happy to see how the outer frame which I worked on allowed others to feel that that was taken care of, so they could concentrate on other aspects.

Ganesh: For me the Dreamweaving process was very difficult. I’d been looking at the Galaxy for years, but I had never looked at the Crown like this before. So my first need was to understand how I see the Crown, and this involved a dialogue with the Galaxy model. I feel I’m not finished with this yet, but then, at the beginning of January, we were already at the technical presentations stage. They were very good, so the second weave for me was how to internalize all this technical knowledge and mix it with my initial understanding of the Crown. I was struggling with this, day and night.

The third weave was when everybody started putting their ideas on the table. There was so much quality there I began to realize how much I needed to carry in my head to make the alchemy happen. It became very intense, even crazy. Everything in our household revolved around the Galaxy and the Crown, even when Neha [his partner, another Dreamweaving architect, eds.] and I were doing the cooking. It was like a 24-hour Dreamweaving process!

Neha: Ganesh and I had slightly opposing views, so we were constantly questioning each other. Personally, I’d been pushing myself to look at what seemed like separate, almost opposing, places to start from and attempting to synthesize these. So I was saying yes to the vision, yes to the context. I didn’t want to say it was this or that, but this and that. The tighter things became outside, the more news we got about things that were not negotiable, the more I found myself pushing to find ways of processing and synthesizing the ‘non-negotiables’.

Ganesh: One of the challenges was to find something that people with opposing views could feel okay with. To take the highest of what people on both sides hold, and merge them. Then there is nothing to react against. That was the challenge, that is the key. I think that was the whole intention of the Dreamweaving exercise.

Do you feel that the Dreamweaving depersonalized what you were doing, that you felt part of something larger than yourself that wasn’t ‘owned’ by any of you?

Mona: I think everybody who has worked on this project feels it belongs to everybody, that it belongs to the larger community, which is amazing because normally a project has one architect who ‘owns’ it.

Dorle: I was looking at it from the point of view of what needed to be done, not so much what I would I like to do. That is why I focused more on infrastructure and climate, because they are crucial, and infrastructure needed more innovative solutions.

Neha: There were moments when a beautiful synthesis did happen, but even in moments when it didn’t, most of our work seemed to complement each other within the wider context.

Fabian: I think it’s natural in an ever more complex world that as an individual your solution will never be as satisfying as when individuals work together. The ‘we’ is always much more than any ‘I’. When you are in a safe space (now and here more important than ever) and have a shared vision (the Dream, the Charter and even the Galaxy), there is ideally no clash of egos. Working together has so much potential, and can be enormously joyful. However, you need good facilitation, and communication and collaboration involves a lot of patience, as well as the capability to listen, to look within, to question yourself and see if you are ready to look for something that is not yet there.

Shailaja: As long as we are discussing at an ideas level, there is a lot of flexibility with each other’s way of thinking, but once the project has to be manifested on the land, will we be that flexible? I’m not so sure.

Ganesh: I think it is the individual pushing him or herself which is crucial to the success of this process. The collective is important, you do take ideas from others, but those ideas have come because individuals were pushing themselves. So I feel when you’re working, you should keep the collective out of your consciousness and just focus on your work.

Even when two people work on a project, they design individually and the mixing happens when both come to their top levels. You have to take things to a level where the solution becomes obvious, where there is no other choice.

Mona: We had a small experience of this in the Dreamspaces on the Greenbelt and the entrance to Auroville in 2006.When you empower somebody and let them run with it, they give their best. This is why creating a safe space is so important because it gives everybody the opportunity to raise the bar. When we are all working collectively for something higher, the result is the highest common factor, not the lowest common denominator.

What about the larger significance of this particular exercise? Were you aware that many in the community had big expectations of this exercise?

 Dorle: I think that many people were putting a lot of hope on the Dreamweaving. I’m not sure we were able to meet their expectations. We did our best, but I don’t know if we will achieve what we were hoping to achieve. But for Auroville as a whole I think it definitely achieved something. It built a certain togetherness in the wider community. People resonate when they see people participating in something that is for all of us. Whatever the outcome, that is also important.

Ganesh: Officially we had no status, we were not getting paid, and there was a certain purity in that. It was a pure offering, and it was that gesture to which the community responded.

Neha: In conclusion, I was hoping for in-depth conversations with the community over the output, as a first step towards a wider collaboration

Fabian: I was very aware of the significance of this process, of how this collaboration shows what can be done when people coming from very different backgrounds sit together, with open minds and hearts, and work on a difficult issue. I think this is the biggest plus of the process. This was so important at a time like this when one energy really believes that the way to go forward is a non-questioning, top-down approach, and there is another energy which tries to integrate. This is why I was so happy when Rajeev of the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, a professional planner who knows Auroville and India, all the time affirmed that the planning process has to be collaborative, that it cannot be anything else.

Shailaja: It’s all about respect. Respecting that somebody has thought about something, so we need to listen to them and not immediately react. I think this is something which each individual needs to do with every other individual in this community.

Do you think that this process could be used for other topics in the community?

Fabian: I think it is very applicable for anything in Auroville. For any process that you want to deal with, the key ingredients are that people with different perspectives come to the table in a safe, well facilitated space, respectfully listen to each other, and then take the best of what they hear and constantly improve, evolve, it. This should work for everything, for families, communities, as well as topics like architecture, urban planning, governance, water management, bioregional communication etc. The ability to develop this kind of process, which is a tool to help us evolve on many levels, is one of the things that make Auroville unique.

Have you been personally impacted or changed by this Dreamweaving exercise, and if so how?

 Neha: It made me realise that I have to express myself, to keep standing for what I think, even though doing that is uncomfortable for me.

Ganesh: I feel I overdid it sometimes, the experience became too intense. When we started, we visited Darkali where part of the forest had been cut, and when you see that you realise something has to happen. But how to solve that problem, that was the core of what we were doing. Perhaps we didn’t manage to solve anything, but, ideally, I feel we shouldn’t lose the trajectory we developed in this space.

Tanja: For me it was super intense, and it pushed me to go deeply into the topic. I noticed that I like to work with groups of people to brainstorm ideas and come up with proposals. In fact, I would also have liked it if we had exchanged much more feedback among us architects during this process, but there was simply not enough time.

Shailaja: What came up for me was the fact of the very strong existence of the Galaxy plan, and the very strong existence of what already is, the ground reality. At a certain point in this process everybody was talking about both, not either/or, and I felt that was wonderful. My personal learning was actually they are both the same, they are one, and this is something I didn’t know before. For me, that was a transformation.

Fabian: The Dreamweaving was a very reaffirming experience because the last months were very difficult and a lot of people were even wondering if Auroville is still their place. So when, after our community presentation, people told me it had made them really aware of what a precious community we are, that helped me a lot. And to see that a large part of the community is behind such a collaborative effort, across cultures and different social backgrounds, is really great. It helped me to reconnect with the uniqueness of this community.

Dorle: One thing this exercise made me realise is that building Auroville is not going to be an easy task. Putting together the ground realities, climatic conditions, sustainable building practices and the Galaxy vision is more challenging than I had assumed because there are so many levels and things to integrate, which one only sees when one starts to work on it. It’s certainly more complex than just putting buildings on the land.

Mona: As a co-facilitator of this whole Dreamweaving process, I was learning so much. It was a great team effort with the Citizens’ Assembly team, and it has given so much hope because now the community will remember that something like this is possible, even if it may not get fully implemented. But we have to keep up our efforts towards achieving that: we shouldn’t throw in the towel too soon.