1. Claudia Andujar is an artist of multiple perspectives, who does not restrict herself to photographs of the Yanomami people, but focuses her camera on distinctly different places in Brazil. Besides the photos with the Yanomami, she has already portrayed the profile of the city, delved into São Paulo’s Rua Direita and captured a diversity of urban scenes and characters.
2. Andujar always focuses on the human creature and is concerned about the paradoxes that involve the species. In the Yanomami series she seeks to capture the being and not the Indian: in these photographs of indigenous people she highlights the profound gaze, the body in its gentleness, in its power and its tragedy. In the urban photographs she deals with ecology and not cityscapes: in these urban works she gives expression to the conditions of day to day experience, to the velocity of the things and the disorder constructed by civilization.
3. She is an artist and not an anthropologist. For this reason, she combines ethics and aesthetics. Her works are obtained by way of sharing, through the artist’s experience of learning by living with the Other, by her awareness of difficult sociability and her insistence on making art.
4. The photographic language exercised by Andujar is the result of a performance. It implicitly involves the action and the interaction of the body with the environment and with the Other. To obtain her photographs she acts with her entire body, displacing herself and moving from one place to another, changing her perspective in reaction to the events. For example: living among the Yanomami, walking through the streets. The artist’s works therefore presuppose action and locomotion. Wandering in search of something…
5. Andujar’s artistic practice involves performance: she took a trip, she included her body and her perceptions in a process of displacement, controlling some programmed actions while going with the flow of eventual random events. She obtained first-hand experience of the different spaces and exchanged information with the environment.
6. It was in this way that in 1976, for 16 days, Claudia Andujar undertook an endless voyage, aboard a black Volkswagen Beetle. She left the city of São Paulo, went north to Mato Grosso, passed through Manaus, crossed Rondônia, to arrive in Roraima. She drove along various highways, including the Perimetral Norte – BR-210. This long process gave rise to a series of practices that validate the experiences she had during her displacements as well as the final results manifested in the photographs.
7. And, in this trip-performance, she photographed a lot. The act of photographing became as commonplace to her as breathing.
8. Photographing stems from the artist’s aesthetic choice for a mechanical support to give an account of the things in the world. That is, it involves the construction of a language to probe and organize the surrounding reality. With this, Andujar not only captures the instant, but also the sense of the moment and the sense of flow of the passage of time. She retains what is apparently fleeting and makes it universal. This entire process is clarified even more when the artist displaces herself in an extensive itinerary.
9. This trip by Claudia Andujar finds its cinematographic equivalence in the film “Bye, Bye, Brasil” (1979), by Carlos Diegues. Both authors hit the road in the country’s North to give an account of personal and social searchings. And, Brazil itself is the protagonist of these two sagas.
10. In this project of displacing herself to different places within the country in 1976, Andujar made the photographs featured at this exhibition at Galeria Vermelho. Among the countless photos obtained throughout the trip, 12 were chosen, arranged in four triptychs. The succession of three images, in each work, synthesizes the trip, allowing the viewer to see the movement of the body and the car in space, while indicating the passage of time. The sequence of three images, in each unit, also retains the idea of displacement.
11. The trip was an experience of the artist’s presence in the world which gave rise to images that convey not only the pulse of reality but also new experiments of language. All of the photographs were made in black and white, showing that minimal resources can best express the concreteness of the real.
12. There is an omnipresent figure in the photographs, which is the black Beetle, acquired exclusively for this undertaking. From within its interior Andujar directs the camera toward the exterior. All the photographs are obtained from inside the car looking out. Each photograph has a double framing: one given by the camera’s lens, the other framed by the structure of the car.
13. Thus, from the car’s interior, Andujar looks at the outside world, recording in the foreground parts of the Beetle’s architecture and internal space. The viewer immediately perceives the car’s windows, pillars, rear-view mirror and rear panel.
14. The show features four triptychs, which always transmit a perception of velocity. The camera moves with two parameters as a reference: the relative inertia given by the constructive parts of the car, and the fleeting passage of the exterior scene.
15. Besides treating on displacement, these photos discuss the inside-outside relation. In these images, the internal space always coexists with the space outside. The dichotomies disappear to give rise to a unity between different places and situations. The photographs explore the separations in simultaneity and manage to join two spatial dimensions within a single plane.
16. When Claudia Andujar arrived at her supposed destination (since the trip is a permanent situation for the artist), in Roraima, the Indians received her exclaiming watupari (vulture being). The black Beetle, used for locomotion during the trip, appears to the Yanomami people as a vulture that lost its feathers and nevertheless has flown far.
17. Claudia Andujar’s photographs peer at reality, probe the human.
18. One triptych presents the city of São Paulo, a compact urban mass. It also includes a fleeting image of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In this set, the images are more stable, the general tone is darker, and the automobile’s architecture is very present. As though the industrial structure given to the car’s fuselage corresponded to the high degree of urbanization that characterizes the automobile’s surroundings at that moment of the displacement.
19. The general sequence of the works shown begins when the artist and car leave the center of the city, headed toward the suburbs; the city falls behind to give way to Brazil’s interior, to the forest that will become vast fields, because the trees have been cut down.
20. Another triptych shows the forest, partly cut down, in the country’s North, near the destination. The photos of this work were made with infrared light. This results in a bursting light, concealing and revealing the forest – it is suspected that it was burned. What would have furnished the excessive light that appears in these photographs? Only the infrared, or the remnants of the recent fire in the trees?
21. Claudia Andujar relates all of the photos with each other, the urban is present in the rural, and the expansion of the urban profoundly affects the countryside. These works are records and memories, clearly evincing the artist’s critical awareness.
22. One characteristic of the infrared is to make all the living material brightly lit, while the dead material is tinged with darkness. This process offers contrasts between transparency and density, between light and shadow. And, generally, all of the works obtained during the trip took advantage of these contrasts, as if the photographs were metaphors of the conflicts existing in the world outside the automobile.
23. Another approximation between Andujar’s pictorial and cinematographic photos can now be made with the two films by Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) and Terra em Transe (1967). The work of each artist can be read from either a political or formal point of view. The two seek to understand Brazil based on their own experiences, underscoring the presence of the tragic view to formulate the world and politics. Like Glauber Rocha, Andujar also works with the formal contrasts in the images and bursts the light to affect our perception, to shout against a nation’s maladies.
24. Claudia Andujar’s work is pervaded by the political dimension. What immediately comes to mind here is the series Marcados [Marked] (1981–1983) or her activities in defense of indigenous causes.
25. The work of this artist presents probing questions about Brazil – its people and its places, looking at the country through an outsider’s perspective. In certain circumstances, this perspective of the traveler that comes from the outside helps to sharpen the perception of things and to lend more expressivity to the questions of reality. 26. The photos captured during the flight of the “vulture” evince the traveler’s point of view, in a double way: in terms of an understanding of Brazil, as well as in terms of self-knowledge.
27. In Andujar, photography should be understood, moreover, as a form of art-knowledge.
28. Andujar’s photographs are part of experiences for the formation of her own identity. In this process, the photographer must necessarily establish a relationship with the Other and with the environment. To photograph is to investigate the real and to find a meaning in it, while it is also a movement away from and toward subjectivity.
29. For this reason, the political dimension in this artist is not explicit and determinate, since the political content is delimited by existential and formal questions. In Andujar there is an aesthetic amplitude that widens the scope of the political.
30. By using an automobile for her transportation, making it a character of the photographs, and using a high-tech camera, Andujar engenders actions and knowledge in the industrial and Occidental order, while heading toward an encounter with the Orient. How to soften the impact of this confrontation? The trip allows her to leave the values of hegemonic society behind in order to create conditions for encountering the Yanomami people. A period of time is necessary for her to prepare for the encounter between the self and the Other.
31. The 16 days constitute a waiting period. The time inside the car is the time of retreat and withdrawal from the velocity of the external time. The photographs obtained during the trip thus express the slowness and density, given symbolically in the foreground of each photograph, by the internal structure of the house-automobile, while also expressing the meldings and overlayings, given by the impression of velocity, a value that moves the surrounding society.
32. During the 16-day trip, Claudia Andujar probed the country to heighten her own awareness.
33. This trip from 1976 is a ritual of passage: life. It is a long-duration performance as proposed by Marina Abramovic: art. During it, a rite took place along with a delivery, as the Yanomami do. This performative happening that lasted 16 days is a summary of Claudia Andujar’s artistic path, which manages to achieve the difficult and desired approximation between art and life.
São Paulo, April 2013.
Miguel Chaia Miguel Chaia is a researcher with the Nucleus for Studies in Art, Media and Politics (NEAMP), of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), where he is a professor. He has authored various texts on Brazilian art.
1. Claudia Andujar is an artist of multiple perspectives, who does not restrict herself to photographs of the Yanomami people, but focuses her camera on distinctly different places in Brazil. Besides the photos with the Yanomami, she has already portrayed the profile of the city, delved into São Paulo’s Rua Direita and captured a diversity of urban scenes and characters.
2. Andujar always focuses on the human creature and is concerned about the paradoxes that involve the species. In the Yanomami series she seeks to capture the being and not the Indian: in these photographs of indigenous people she highlights the profound gaze, the body in its gentleness, in its power and its tragedy. In the urban photographs she deals with ecology and not cityscapes: in these urban works she gives expression to the conditions of day to day experience, to the velocity of the things and the disorder constructed by civilization.
3. She is an artist and not an anthropologist. For this reason, she combines ethics and aesthetics. Her works are obtained by way of sharing, through the artist’s experience of learning by living with the Other, by her awareness of difficult sociability and her insistence on making art.
4. The photographic language exercised by Andujar is the result of a performance. It implicitly involves the action and the interaction of the body with the environment and with the Other. To obtain her photographs she acts with her entire body, displacing herself and moving from one place to another, changing her perspective in reaction to the events. For example: living among the Yanomami, walking through the streets. The artist’s works therefore presuppose action and locomotion. Wandering in search of something…
5. Andujar’s artistic practice involves performance: she took a trip, she included her body and her perceptions in a process of displacement, controlling some programmed actions while going with the flow of eventual random events. She obtained first-hand experience of the different spaces and exchanged information with the environment.
6. It was in this way that in 1976, for 16 days, Claudia Andujar undertook an endless voyage, aboard a black Volkswagen Beetle. She left the city of São Paulo, went north to Mato Grosso, passed through Manaus, crossed Rondônia, to arrive in Roraima. She drove along various highways, including the Perimetral Norte – BR-210. This long process gave rise to a series of practices that validate the experiences she had during her displacements as well as the final results manifested in the photographs.
7. And, in this trip-performance, she photographed a lot. The act of photographing became as commonplace to her as breathing.
8. Photographing stems from the artist’s aesthetic choice for a mechanical support to give an account of the things in the world. That is, it involves the construction of a language to probe and organize the surrounding reality. With this, Andujar not only captures the instant, but also the sense of the moment and the sense of flow of the passage of time. She retains what is apparently fleeting and makes it universal. This entire process is clarified even more when the artist displaces herself in an extensive itinerary.
9. This trip by Claudia Andujar finds its cinematographic equivalence in the film “Bye, Bye, Brasil” (1979), by Carlos Diegues. Both authors hit the road in the country’s North to give an account of personal and social searchings. And, Brazil itself is the protagonist of these two sagas.
10. In this project of displacing herself to different places within the country in 1976, Andujar made the photographs featured at this exhibition at Galeria Vermelho. Among the countless photos obtained throughout the trip, 12 were chosen, arranged in four triptychs. The succession of three images, in each work, synthesizes the trip, allowing the viewer to see the movement of the body and the car in space, while indicating the passage of time. The sequence of three images, in each unit, also retains the idea of displacement.
11. The trip was an experience of the artist’s presence in the world which gave rise to images that convey not only the pulse of reality but also new experiments of language. All of the photographs were made in black and white, showing that minimal resources can best express the concreteness of the real.
12. There is an omnipresent figure in the photographs, which is the black Beetle, acquired exclusively for this undertaking. From within its interior Andujar directs the camera toward the exterior. All the photographs are obtained from inside the car looking out. Each photograph has a double framing: one given by the camera’s lens, the other framed by the structure of the car.
13. Thus, from the car’s interior, Andujar looks at the outside world, recording in the foreground parts of the Beetle’s architecture and internal space. The viewer immediately perceives the car’s windows, pillars, rear-view mirror and rear panel.
14. The show features four triptychs, which always transmit a perception of velocity. The camera moves with two parameters as a reference: the relative inertia given by the constructive parts of the car, and the fleeting passage of the exterior scene.
15. Besides treating on displacement, these photos discuss the inside-outside relation. In these images, the internal space always coexists with the space outside. The dichotomies disappear to give rise to a unity between different places and situations. The photographs explore the separations in simultaneity and manage to join two spatial dimensions within a single plane.
16. When Claudia Andujar arrived at her supposed destination (since the trip is a permanent situation for the artist), in Roraima, the Indians received her exclaiming watupari (vulture being). The black Beetle, used for locomotion during the trip, appears to the Yanomami people as a vulture that lost its feathers and nevertheless has flown far.
17. Claudia Andujar’s photographs peer at reality, probe the human.
18. One triptych presents the city of São Paulo, a compact urban mass. It also includes a fleeting image of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In this set, the images are more stable, the general tone is darker, and the automobile’s architecture is very present. As though the industrial structure given to the car’s fuselage corresponded to the high degree of urbanization that characterizes the automobile’s surroundings at that moment of the displacement.
19. The general sequence of the works shown begins when the artist and car leave the center of the city, headed toward the suburbs; the city falls behind to give way to Brazil’s interior, to the forest that will become vast fields, because the trees have been cut down.
20. Another triptych shows the forest, partly cut down, in the country’s North, near the destination. The photos of this work were made with infrared light. This results in a bursting light, concealing and revealing the forest – it is suspected that it was burned. What would have furnished the excessive light that appears in these photographs? Only the infrared, or the remnants of the recent fire in the trees?
21. Claudia Andujar relates all of the photos with each other, the urban is present in the rural, and the expansion of the urban profoundly affects the countryside. These works are records and memories, clearly evincing the artist’s critical awareness.
22. One characteristic of the infrared is to make all the living material brightly lit, while the dead material is tinged with darkness. This process offers contrasts between transparency and density, between light and shadow. And, generally, all of the works obtained during the trip took advantage of these contrasts, as if the photographs were metaphors of the conflicts existing in the world outside the automobile.
23. Another approximation between Andujar’s pictorial and cinematographic photos can now be made with the two films by Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) and Terra em Transe (1967). The work of each artist can be read from either a political or formal point of view. The two seek to understand Brazil based on their own experiences, underscoring the presence of the tragic view to formulate the world and politics. Like Glauber Rocha, Andujar also works with the formal contrasts in the images and bursts the light to affect our perception, to shout against a nation’s maladies.
24. Claudia Andujar’s work is pervaded by the political dimension. What immediately comes to mind here is the series Marcados [Marked] (1981–1983) or her activities in defense of indigenous causes.
25. The work of this artist presents probing questions about Brazil – its people and its places, looking at the country through an outsider’s perspective. In certain circumstances, this perspective of the traveler that comes from the outside helps to sharpen the perception of things and to lend more expressivity to the questions of reality. 26. The photos captured during the flight of the “vulture” evince the traveler’s point of view, in a double way: in terms of an understanding of Brazil, as well as in terms of self-knowledge.
27. In Andujar, photography should be understood, moreover, as a form of art-knowledge.
28. Andujar’s photographs are part of experiences for the formation of her own identity. In this process, the photographer must necessarily establish a relationship with the Other and with the environment. To photograph is to investigate the real and to find a meaning in it, while it is also a movement away from and toward subjectivity.
29. For this reason, the political dimension in this artist is not explicit and determinate, since the political content is delimited by existential and formal questions. In Andujar there is an aesthetic amplitude that widens the scope of the political.
30. By using an automobile for her transportation, making it a character of the photographs, and using a high-tech camera, Andujar engenders actions and knowledge in the industrial and Occidental order, while heading toward an encounter with the Orient. How to soften the impact of this confrontation? The trip allows her to leave the values of hegemonic society behind in order to create conditions for encountering the Yanomami people. A period of time is necessary for her to prepare for the encounter between the self and the Other.
31. The 16 days constitute a waiting period. The time inside the car is the time of retreat and withdrawal from the velocity of the external time. The photographs obtained during the trip thus express the slowness and density, given symbolically in the foreground of each photograph, by the internal structure of the house-automobile, while also expressing the meldings and overlayings, given by the impression of velocity, a value that moves the surrounding society.
32. During the 16-day trip, Claudia Andujar probed the country to heighten her own awareness.
33. This trip from 1976 is a ritual of passage: life. It is a long-duration performance as proposed by Marina Abramovic: art. During it, a rite took place along with a delivery, as the Yanomami do. This performative happening that lasted 16 days is a summary of Claudia Andujar’s artistic path, which manages to achieve the difficult and desired approximation between art and life.
São Paulo, April 2013.
Miguel Chaia Miguel Chaia is a researcher with the Nucleus for Studies in Art, Media and Politics (NEAMP), of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), where he is a professor. He has authored various texts on Brazilian art.
