Marco Feira

Marco joined Auroville almost 30 years ago. His has been 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, they joined the community, and gave their antiquities business to the people who had been working with them. Marco and Liliana then started the fashion and jewellery Auroville unit called Miniature – a name chosen as a living reminder to keep the business small. 

Lover and Supporter of the Arts, Cinema, and Tai Chi

Marco will be particularly remembered for his role in stimulating the arts in Auroville. Together with four other Aurovilians, in 2010 he started the Auroville Art Service, aiming at supporting and developing the arts in Auroville. He was concerned that Auroville would be built by bureaucrats and politicians who don't have any artistic ideas and don’t care about art, because art doesn't produce money. For a brief period of time, the Service published the magazine MAgzAV, which focused on questions of what the new culture of Auroville would be and how art could contribute to the building of the city and inspire spiritual search.

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 would experience 'something' and ask questions so deep that answers at the spiritual level need to be found. 

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 December 27th at the Auroville Burial Grounds.