Claudia Andujar exposes images of Indians mixing art and politics – 14/12/2018 – Illustrated

Switzerland Claudine Haas, a young survivor of Nazi barbarism during the Second World War, followed a long, bumpy and congested road until she arrived in Brazil in 1955, at the age of 24 years.

She is fluent in English, but is illiterate in Portuguese. discovered in a camera the medium to start interacting with this place that filled it with curiosity and charm.

"I was very interested in Brazil and photography was a way to understand the new world met here." At that time, I started to photograph the places I went to, "says Claudia Andujar., With the apt name and last name of her ex-husband, refugee from the known Spanish Civil War in New York , Claudine became internationally known as a photographer and advocate of the Yanomami people

"She has a life story that continues Thyago Nogueira, director of the contemporary photography department at the Moreira Salles Institute and organizer of a retrospective of the artist who starts this Saturday (15) in São Paulo.

There are about 300 images. who form the course of Andujar in two rooms of the institute since his contact with the Yanomami in the Amazon in the early 1970s.

"At some point," she says, "I decided to seek a people, to whom I would devote myself as long as I deem it necessary. "

"Claudia saw the paternal family, of Jewish origin, being taken to the ghetto and then murdered."

"It was a search that had links to his painful European experience: It's a very touching story.He remembers in detail the day the father knew that he would be taken away and that he was going to say goodbye, in the presence of his mother, "says Nogueira

Before meeting the Yanomami, she had come to the meeting, by appointment of anthropologist and friend Darcy Ribeiro , Carajas and Bororo. It was a Swiss journalist, René Furst, who suggested that I go to the Yanomami, "he recalls." He stayed there for a moment and thought I was going to hear him, and he he told me that I had to go to Catrimani, where they had Italian missionaries. I was a little while, then I came back, I came back for years. "

However, Andujar was forced to move on from a project of author of photographic interpretation and artistic Yanomami culture to a political militancy aimed at the survival of this people.

The turning point was the decision of the government of General Medici to give start of a project of occupation and "settlement of the Amazon: clearing the forest and facilitating access to remote frontier areas, promising natural resources

An Amazon settlement plan was launched, accompanied by a major transfer of hands Northeast: A point east of the construction of the Perimetral Norte highway, the valley of the Catrimani River, where the Yanomami lived with whom Andujar had created links, began to be invaded by machines, trucks and colonists.

The ferocious undertaking of the dictatorship resulted in death and degradation. to the Indians. "The idea of ​​incorporating an isolated people into the political, ideological and economic structure of the country has changed their lives," said Andujar, who once again faced the traumatic threat of eliminating the dead. a people with whom he identified himself

"She settled deeply in this group and it became the theater of a national tragedy, people died, victims of diseases and violence, her new friends were beginning to be exterminated, "says Nogueira

Faced with the macabre spectacle she witnessed, the photographer despaired and began to move his forces to fight for the demarcation of the Yanomami territory.

"Today, with the law on access to government documents, it is possible to see how they followed in his footsteps," Nogueira said. "It's called" the stranger ", sometimes anthropologist, psychologist and accused of throwing Indians in the middle to prevent the project from being affected, and she starts to mobilize and attract the Until one day a Funai official comes and says that he was forbidden to stay in this area. "

After years of what Andujar calls" devotion ", Wandering the world in search of allies and pressures on the government, the demarcation of The Yanomami were approved by the Congress under the mandate of Fernando Collor in 1992, the year of the historic summit on the environment held in Rio de Janeiro.

Today, Andujar deserves special treatment from the indigenous group that he has met. "Thyago Nogueira had access to the archives of more than 40,000 images of the photographer and was able to reconstruct, from magazines and documents, the way that the images of Andujar reveal themselves as witnesses to an unusual life, intimately linked to Art and Politics