Half-finished Heaven

In Auroville, southern India, a utopian experiment in collective living persists amid ecological fragility and political pressure. The project traces a community attempting to build paradise while negotiating the contradictions surrounding it.

Auroville is a township in southern India founded in 1968 as an experiment in collective living. Conceived as a universal settlement shaped by the spiritual philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa (“The Mother”), it brought together people from across the world around the possibility of living beyond the divisions of nation, religion, and identity.

Over five decades, this vision transformed a once-barren plateau into a dense forest through collective ecological restoration. In recent years, however, increasing state intervention has begun reshaping parts of the township, altering how decisions are made and placing strain on land that was slowly rebuilt over generations. What was imagined as a refuge from such divisions and pressures now finds itself negotiating them once again.

This project approaches Auroville as a place suspended between what exists and what is still being searched for. The images follow a community attempting to build a place in the image of something it has not yet fully found. The work stays with this condition of becoming, where desire continues to shape how the place is seen and lived. Rather than settling into a fixed form, the township emerges as a series of partial realisations.