Above image: Journey by pirogue, Catrimani, Roraima, 1974, Claudia Andujar

Swiss-born Brazilian artist Claudia Andujar has spent a lifetime documenting the Yanomami, an indigenous people living in villages in the Amazon rainforest.

In the 1970s, when most of the group hadn’t met any outsiders, Andujar committed to building genuine relationships before picking up the camera, and her many visits since have resulted in decades-long friendships. The artist also turned activist: campaigning for, and helping to win, the right for Yanomami land to be protected, and also spotlighting the existence of the group to the wider world.

After Fondation Cartier opened the largest exhibition of her work earlier this year (previewed in the 2019 HERO Winter Annual, with an interview of Adujar by Hans Ulrich Obrist), the museum are digitising the experience via a microsite that mirrors the curatorial structure of the physical show.

Split into three chapters relating to periods in Andujar’s life, the exhibition maps the genesis of her immersive practice and its evolution into the activism-focused work she does today (Adujar no longer takes photographs herself), battling Jair Bolsonaro’s shameful neglect of Brazil’s endangered Amazon.

Beginning with the artist’s early years in Switzerland (where she was born Claudine Haas), during which she escaped the Holocaust with her Jewish Protestant Transylvanian family, Andujar’s later work with marginalised and vulnerable Yanomami members is back-dropped by her personal experiences of persecution, which included her entire paternal family being killed at Auschwitz.

In the second and third chapters, the exhibitions explores Andujar’s initial contact with the Yanomami tribe and the following five decades of her life that she dedicated towards photographing them. The images, many thousands of which are on show at the Cartier Foundation, reflect Andujar’s personal journey among the Yanomami: initially adopting a conventional documentary style and then, as the years passed and trust deepened, a more sensory and experiential quality that was more expressive of the Yanomami experience.

Using double exposure, long exposures, coloured filters or smearing vaseline on the lens, Andujar manipulated and moulded her photographs to do justice to her sebject.  Rendering her negatives in an extraordinary palette of vibrant colours, the power of these images have been at the core of her long-standing activism against Brazil’s military dictatorships and extensive logging programs.

Featuring podcasts, special videos, archive images and text, the translation of this exhibition into micro-site provides an excellent summation of Andujar’s legacy, featuring the artist’s own words as much as possible. The principles of Andujar’s work: radical self-immersion, prioritising truth above style and a selfless devotion to speaking on behalf of those who can’t, are crucial lessons for any form of social activism.

Visit the online exhibition here.