Nature speaks to us but we don’t not listen enough to it, lets learn how to use our 5 senses to capture the message that our environment sends us.
It is to this sentence that the artist of UNESCO, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, referred to several times during the interview.
OC: Good Morning Countess, thank you for the time you dedicate to me. To start our interview, can you tell us more about you ?
SKR: I was born in Tokyo. Thanks to the traditional education I was given by my grandmother, I developed, since my childhood, a particular attachment to the spiritual values of Japan. After my marriage with Balthus, which was at the time the director of the French Academy in Rome, I started as a painter. After fifteen years spent at the Villa Medici, we moved to Switzerland, to the Grand Chalet de Rossinière, where I still live. After the disappearance of Balthus, I started to involve myself in all kinds of unexplored fields –write essais, give lectures, participate to symposiums – and I developed a true awareness of the joy of expressing myself, by externalizing my thoughts. Beside my painting and my activity of artist of the UNESCO for peace and now my participation to the Ahimsa Forums, where I can meet exceptional people who inspire my work, I started to do a lot of modelling and ceramics with Astier de Villatte.
OC: Does your organization, the Balthus Foundation, have common points with Ahimsa Fund?
SKR: What brings me closer to the activity of Ahimsa Fund, is its commitment to Health, in its physical as well as spiritual aspects, and all of that through Art, which relates to me and in which I am happy to commit to.
OC: What are the challenges that you have in the realization of your projects and that could help you to fine tune your projects?
SKR: The word challenge makes me think about conflict & disagreements, whereas my work is all about a deep research of harmonization, with the world and myself. I remember an outstanding example of this approach in the activity of Marguerite Barankitse, who has been able to create, in Burundi, a network of orphanages where the conflicts of the enemy tribes seem to, at the end, find peace.
OC: Can you share with us your vision of the world in the 30 years to come ? Which recommendations, would you give to the youth?
SKR: The future is the product of the present, therefore the best way of thinking about the future, and to save our world, is to maintain the maximum of awareness and of possible vigilance over the present. It is what I really which for the future of the youth.
