In memoriam - Marco Feira

Marco Feira passed away in his house in Sharnga community on 26 December at the age of 74. He had been suffering from cancer.

Marco joined Auroville almost 30 years ago. His was a full and varied life, initially shaped by his love for the arts, later by his love for the spiritual. While growing up in Turin, Italy, he started painting and joined the Arte Povera movement, using everyday materials to create a new pictorial language. In the late 1960s he travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India where he fell in love with the arts and antiques. His focus expanded and he became one of the first Italian dealers in Asiatic art and antiquities, running, by the end of the 1970s, a business with more than 20 employees.

India touched him in other ways as well. He started studying Indian philosophy and the Vedas, with his first book being one by Sri Aurobindo which, he said later, he hadn't understood at all. Together with his wife Liliana, Marco discovered Auroville. After visiting Auroville for many years, in 1997 they joined and gave their antiquities business to the people who had been working with them. Marco and Liliana then started the fashion and jewellery unit Miniature – a name chosen as a living reminder to keep the business small.

Marco will be particularly remembered for his role in stimulating the arts in Auroville. Together with four other Aurovilians, he started the Auroville Art Service in 2010, aiming at supporting and developing the arts in Auroville. He was concerned that Auroville would be built by bureaucrats and politicians who didn't have any artistic ideas and didn’t care about art, because art doesn't produce money. He stressed the importance of art for Auroville and followed what The Mother had said about art:

“Art is nothing less in its fundamental truth than the aspect of beauty of the Divine manifestation. … like a Yogi an artist goes into deep contemplation to await and receive his inspiration. To create something truly beautiful, he has first to see it within, to realise it as a whole in his inner consciousness; only when so found, seen, held within, can he execute it outwardly; he creates according to this greater inner vision. This too is a kind of yogic discipline, for by it he enters into intimate communion with the inner worlds.”

For a brief period of time, the Auroville Art Service published the magazine MAgzAV, which focused on questions around what the new culture of Auroville would be, how art could contribute to the building of the city and inspire spiritual search, and how Auroville artists could become revealers and teachers of the divine beauty in life.

Marco also curated many art shows, amongst which the exhibition Transformation, which was part of The Auroville Festival – City for Transformation at the India International Center, New Delhi, in September 2012. The exhibition, which showed works of Auroville artists, was a great success and led Marco to dream about an Auroville Museum of Modern Art, which would host art that spoke directly to the viewer, who should experience 'something' and ask questions so deep that answers would have to be found at the spiritual level.

Cinema was another art form Marco loved. He created the Cinema Paradiso in Auroville’s Multi-Media Centre, showing films from different parts of the world, and started the bi-annual Auroville Film Festival, a platform for movies made by people from Auroville and elsewhere. The experience led to exchange programmes with film festivals in other parts of the world and to the decision to make film making part of the curriculum of Auroville’s schools.

His focus on art was supported by his focus on Tai Chi. When he was young, Marco had stayed some time in a Zen monastery in Japan learning breathing techniques, concentration and meditation, which became part of his daily routine. In Auroville he learned a form of Tai Chi called The Inner Way from master Vlady Stevanovitch. He studied this form intensively and became a teacher himself, ultimately training between 200 and 400 people a year for more than 20 years.

Marco’s remains were buried on 27 December at the Auroville Burial Grounds.