"Aeroporto" is an exhibition made up of 23 photographs and another series of 16 in which flight attendants are photographed without any glamour, in portraits that resemble 3x4s. "I wanted to do something hyperrealistic, without analytical observations", explains Jaguaribe. "It also ends up being a profile of women in Brazil: Japanese, black, Italian, Spanish, a mix of everything. Furthermore, there are a series of codes in clothes, hairstyles, accessories. It is a character that they create", he says.
In contrast to the accuracy of the flight attendants' records, the other 23 photos explore textures and images that arise from an attentive look at a place that represents "traffic", "but where people are always waiting", adds Jaguaribe.
Reliefs are born from an aged container, humor from flower arrangements on the verge of kitsch and the exaggeration in the colors of the armchairs; the gloom appears in an image of the luggage conveyor belt ("it's almost like one of those old gold mines", remembers the artist) and the strips that demarcate the track, painted in ochre, can separate themselves from everyday life and compose something new - all seen from overlapping planes.
"I see airports more as non-places", explains Jaguaribe, looking for Marc Augé. "They represent a kind of limbo, where elements from the 50s and somewhat futuristic things mix, on long paths along which you are led. It's the mix of sensations that interests me," she says. A small room dedicates its walls to projecting a video of turbines and the luggage conveyor belt. Jaguaribe states that the movement had to be translated in some way, and the best way found was the movement itself.
Claudia Jaguaribe's photographs cover various aspects of "airport life" that could each result in a new exhibition with just one theme - stewardesses, passers-by, turbines, suitcases, abstractions based on textures. "I'm more interested in the whole than in focusing on just one aspect. And I'm not going to become an airport expert either", she jokes.
Excerpt taken from the article Stewardesses land at Tomie Ohtake by Alexandra Moraes for Folha de São Paulo on November 19, 2002.
