Muriel was born in Belgium in May 1968, a volatile period of civil unrest that started with students revolting against capitalism, consumerism, and traditional institutions, values and order.
19 year old Muriel in 1988 came to India (Mumbai) to do an internship at the Centre of Holistic Studies, centre founded by Winin. She travelled to Warli villages near Talasari, and Dahanu to document tribal local health traditions. Back in Belgium, she wrote her paper to show the importance of indigenous knowledge, and became active in NGOs.
Now, it is more than 20 years that she has been living in India. She travelled to almost every corner of the country and fascinated by India’s ecological traditions and everywhere she went and document vernacular architecture, local cuisines, water harvesting structure, handloom traditions, forest management traditions… Every trip she makes to the interiors still holds for her amazing discoveries. And that she wants is that the last few forests, the last few remote villages where gentle cultures, life-sustaining, and nurturing ways of life are still surviving will forever get spared from the tentacles of development that are fast engulfing the whole world. She believe those primeval pockets hold a few clues to help us get out of our present ‘malaise’. It is amazing to learn that she had been doing it quietly for 20 years for the country without expecting anything in return.
Please visit her website and show your support her by buying her posters.
gonardiya 