Aurovillians to host exhibition in Chennai on June 6

Chennai: A section of residents of Auroville will exhibit to the public in the city on June 6 photographs, videos, testimonies and documentary material on the turmoil at the international township.

Titled, ‘Auroville: An Experiment Under Threat’, the exhibition will feature photographs of what Auroville is, the challenges it has faced in the past five years in terms of environmental destruction and other changes, and its future vision, said Arun Ambathy, Auroville forest group resource person.

The event will be held on June 6, from 11am to 7pm at Spaces, 1 Elliot’s Beach Road, Besant Nagar. From 5pm onwards there will be live music by Auroville farmer and musician Krishna McKenzie.

“The land on which Auroville stands was originally barren, and a sustainable thriving community was created over the years with hundreds of shade trees. Since 2021, the new secretary has bulldozed trees and exchanged lucrative lands on the highway. There have been instances of harassment and violence against those who resisted,” said Kundhavi Devi, a resident of Auroville.

Sindhuja Jagadeesh, long term Aurovillian and Auroville’s legal coordinator, termed fundamentally flawed the central premise of the exhibition: that the implementation of the approved master plan is a threat to Auroville. “Auroville’s greatest threat was not development. It was the gradual capture of the project’s narrative and institutions by a small but influential section of residents who increasingly treated personal preferences as superior to the founder’s vision, the approved master plan, and the statutory framework created to protect them.”