What is Auro Artworld?

With its commitment to the Charter and the Dream of Auroville, Auro Artworld aims to ignite a flame of consciousness and joy in Auroville through the arts. Our mission is to nurture and support the arts in Auroville, and to create an integration of the arts with each other as well as with other disciplines, deep in this community, and in the world.

The vision

Auroville wants to be a new creation, expressing a new consciousness in a new way, according to new methods. Consciousness was the key word the Mother had for Auroville. To live in Auroville is to generate an active field where this new consciousness can create a new life, and with it, a new culture based on unity and a beauty that the consciousness brings.

As Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine, in the future the arts will exist ‘as expressions and means of the truth of the spirit and the beauty and delight of existence’. This is the challenge before artists in Auroville and all those around the world inspired by it.

The unique role of art in Auroville

Auroville is a unique experiment, based on the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This international township is a material base that provides an intense spiritual stimulus for growth in all areas of collective living, environment, practical organization, and planning.

Art in all its expressions – painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance and more, must play their role in the creation of Auroville, a place that wants to surpass all national rivalries, social conventions, contradictory moralities and contending religions, to create a new culture based on Human Unity. To give life to the Mother’s Dream, the artistic dimension must be integrated not only into education and culture, but must manifest in the planning and building of the city itself.

Creation as expression of consciousness

Art in Auroville belongs to all without the necessity of personal ownership. Each one has free access to it if they wish. At the same time a wide artistic training is offered to children for free, who can learn and develop their talents.

Artistic work is not motivated or dominated by market forces in Auroville but wants to be an expression of a consciousness, something that will progressively nourish and energize the human soul and the city in a vast variety of ways.

An umbrella for the arts in Auroville

With a population of only 2500, Auroville has already produced painters and sculptors, musicians and composers, dancers and choreographers, writers and filmmakers, actors and directors, and even hosts a biennial film festival.

Auroville attracts and receives a host of artists from India and all over the world, who wish to offer their work or participate in this unique multicultural experiment. In Auroville, many cultures, races, social strata, languages and experiments converge.

We work to be an arena for activities and events that bring together different peoples, doing away with the stress of differences and conflicts, instead fostering unity between people through artistic means. We do this by supporting individual experiments and group efforts, and creating platforms for artistic research, creation and administration.

Auro Artworld emerged from an introspection into how arts and culture could develop in Auroville.

Values

From its vision to its day-to-day functioning, Auro Artworld strives to remain attentive to the collective psychic being, embodying the values of kindness, integrity, resourcefulness and collaboration. We are driven by a passion for the arts and a sense of service and responsibility to the artists, to the receivers of the arts, and to the Dream and values of Auroville itself. Transparency and openness to change remain core to our ethos and the services we offer to the community.