THE PATH OF SILK
CENTRE D’ART CITADINES
We are always at the right time at the right moment, but sometimes this perception gets even more accentuated as we perceived what we call “the moment of grace”.
With “The Path of Silk” exhibit from Maria Grazia the opened up in “Le Centre d’Art“ in Citadines on the 15th of October, you will visit a dance of silk and spirit all the way from the country of Dante to Mother India.
Maria Grazia’s journey into the spirit started in her home country, Italy, where she was working in an “Avant Garde” theatre exploring a very specific ancient spiritual technique called “Theater of Sources” inspired by Jerzy Grotowsky, a Polish innovative theatre director, who sought to explore new forms of theatrical expression without employing the spoken word and using the actor’s own self as the substance of performance.
From theatre she moved to the Sri Aurobindo Centre in Milan where Maria Grazia met a man called Arka , a name given to him by the Mother . There she got “the call” to go to Auroville. That was in 1982 and here she founded the “Arka Center” whose purpose, according to her, is ”eternal youth” or reversing the ageing process.
The influential impact of her theatre years as well as the Sri Aurobindo Center in Milano tinted her life which was not only comprising of spirit but also of Art. Her hobby has always been working with fabrics and at “New Creation”, where she spent many years looking after the school, she helped decorating the school and teaching Aurovilians and villagers, using mostly a technique known in the silk process as “gutta”. The solvent-based Gutta is a thick substance that is derived from Indonesian rubber trees (Gutta Percha). It is used almost exclusively for the French Serti Technique of painting on silk. The Serti (closing or fence) technique is the silk painting technique where designs are outlined with gutta or water-based resists, which are applied to white silk that has been pre-washed, dried and stretched.
So I hope your path will lead you to Maria Grazia’s path of silk at Citadines, that you will enjoy to get on the Italy-to-India silk road and spirit and, once there, you might even be tempted to buy a pure silk colourful scarf or one of those quilts reminding you of your childhood where you used to draw a happy picture of a house on a river with a mountain in the background and a sun as big and shiny as a heart could be.
This article was written by Chana Corinne Devor for Auroville Art Service. Presently exploring Auroville, she is an art critic and writes for international travel and spiritual magazines.
