Introduction by Stephen Corry, Survival Worldwide, on the event of Brazilian photographer, Claudia Andujar, receiving Germany’s highest cultural prize, the Goethe-Medaille, Weimar, 28 August 2018
Thanks, Goethe-Institut, for the prospect to introduce Claudia Andujar – accompanied by Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa.
When Schiller wrote, “Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng geteilt,”* he meant the magic of pleasure, however we recognise after all how the magic of artwork additionally bridges variations.
At its greatest, it reminds us of an important perception of all: We’re all of equal value, nevertheless in a different way to one another we could look or dwell. All of us have an obligation to assist one another after we can.
Claudia Andujar is an artist and activist. For 50 years she has photographed an Amazon tribe, the Yanomami, a individuals who look, dwell, and assume very in a different way to most of us.
The Yanomami had been already well-known. An anthropologist advised us within the Sixties that these Indians had been savages. However he was mistaken. Claudia exhibits a individuals as loving as any, a individuals preoccupied by their place on this planet, who settle for full accountability for the bodily and religious well being of their wider environment, each the seen and what’s unseen.
No Amazon tribe has been portrayed with deeper understanding.
In 1978, Brazil’s authorities deliberate roads which would scale back the Yanomami to a couple tiny patches of land. It might have destroyed them. Claudia started to marketing campaign for a single space defending all their territory.
She wasn’t alone. A missionary, Carlo Zaquini, stood together with her; an anthropologist, Bruce Albert, joined them. Survival Worldwide was privileged to mission the marketing campaign globally. Most significantly, Davi emerged as the important thing Yanomami voice and information, exhibiting his individuals how the state deliberate their destruction.
The work wouldn’t have succeeded with out Claudia’s tenacity.
Practically 30 years in the past, on the peak of the marketing campaign, I requested Davi and Claudia if they’d stand alongside Survival Worldwide after we got the choice Nobel prize. We needed to make use of the ceremony within the Swedish parliament to maintain consideration on the Yanomami’s predicament. Davi had by no means travelled exterior Brazil, however each agreed. No Amazon shaman of this stature had been to the skin world and it made large information, which led to large strain.
In 1992, after 14 years of campaigning, Brazil lastly agreed to safe Yanomami territory. It had labored.
It didn’t clear up every thing. The realm was invaded by miners bringing violence and illness. And as we speak, Indian land in all places is below menace as Brazil is dragged backwards to an ideology of revenue above individuals. However the Yanomami would merely not have survived with out the marketing campaign.
I can’t consider one other artist wherever who has saved a complete part of our human household. Yanomami territory is now the most important space of rainforest on this planet protected by Indigenous individuals, and they’re far, much better conservationists than our “consultants.”
Some Yanomami are uncontacted by outsiders, and all nonetheless want the facility of public strain as Brazilian politics strikes in opposition to them as soon as extra.
Claudia’s work, seen by hundreds of thousands, stays a novel legacy for all humanity.
There’s extra. Claudia grew up on the Romanian-Hungarian border throughout the Nineteen Thirties, her city falling below Nationwide Socialist occupation. Sooner or later a pleasant policeman let her mom know that Claudia’s father confronted arrest: He should escape right away. Claudia went to inform him, however he didn’t go, and it was the final time she noticed him earlier than he was taken to die in focus camp horror.
Claudia’s mom fled together with her daughter. The pair reached Austria earlier than the key police started questioning the mom, leaving the kid alone in Vienna.
This 13-year outdated lady walked repeatedly into the Gestapo headquarters, on her personal, asking for her mom, on a regular basis hiding – inside her physique – a letter which might have had them each shot if it had been discovered.
The Gestapo lastly allow them to go, and the pair reached impartial Switzerland, finally to to migrate to Brazil.
I started with Schiller’s phrases concerning the magic which unites individuals. These phrases had been after all set to music by one other radical artist, Beethoven, and far later, following the horrors of Nationwide Socialism, they grew to become the anthem of most of western Europe, united in peace for the primary time in historical past.
It’s a testomony to you, the inheritors of such progressive considering, that Germany has given its award, named after Goethe, Schiller’s buddy, to this survivor of a crushed Europe. A lady who grew into each a novel photographer and a saviour of a distant, and superficially very completely different, individuals.
Claudia Andujar doesn’t see herself a hero, so I’m honoured to sketch this extraordinary story of my intrepid buddy. I consider that, just like the Yanomami, her legacy will endure for a lot of generations, in her photos, however most of all within the survival of the rainforest and its individuals.
*“Your magic reunites these divided by customized.”
