Woodworking

The Auroville Youth Center has sent out a mass bulletin to all residents stating that the Youth Center is a place of learning, exploration and personal growth for youth of all kinds and ages and that it has recently started to work closely with the community, creating various workshops such as welding, woodwork, kombucha making, mushroom cultivation; with more to come.

Auroville’s second Endangered Craft Mela took place in February, and it was a lively event. For one week, the Youth Centre was transformed into a hive of activity, with 50 craftspeople sharing their skills and 250 excited children being inducted into the pleasure of making objects with their hands

The undisputed master of Auroville woodworking is Japanese Aurovilian Kenji Matsumoto. But it was by chance, he says, that woodworking became his profession.

The large hall on the ground floor of the Centre for Scientific Research, earlier used for researching ferro-cement technology, now houses one of the work spaces of Prakrit, the wood working unit created by Danish Aurovilian Torkil Dantzer a few years ago.

In November, the Citadines Art Gallery hosted an exhibition of the woodcraft of Auroville architect Tejaswini, made in Auroville over the past year.

The doors are four meters high, each smoothly rotating on two ball bearings. The scene is the new Centre for Indian Culture at Bharat Nivas, the construction of which is in the finishing phases.

Auroville’s Hall of Peace, the home of the Peace Table for Asia, was inaugurated on February 11th, 2014.