Wasteland: Garbage to Art, Picker to Person

Contemporary artist Vik Muniz

            Imagine climbing up a mountain range of trash, soaking wet and oozing with the foul odor that emanates from your kitchen when you have waited too long to take out the trash.  Imagine burying hard-worn and leathered hands deep into piles and piles of organic waste, like leftover cow meat and rotting banana peels, endless plastic bottles carelessly thrown out, and perfectly good objects, from books on the philosopher Nietzsche to expensive shirts, shoes and children’s dolls that now look like they have emerged from a creepy horror film.  Imagine this is your life: waking up with the harsh, smog-smothered sun each morning in a helplessly small shack only to walk down the littered street to spend a16-hour day of back breaking work picking recyclable materials from 7,000 tons of waste that arrives daily at the largest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  This is a day in the life of the 3,000 catadores, or more bluntly “pickers,” who work in this toxic, polluted landscape.

Welcome to the largest landfill in the world.

            The award-winning documentary Waste Land follows the gritty, yet emotionally uplifting, story of the pickers of Jardim Gramacho and their personal rejuvenation and renewed hope through their transformative art experience with world famous contemporary artist Vik Muniz. The film artistically and effectively questions the failure of modern urbanization to provide economic and social justice and how this malfunction magnifies our dire global ecological crisis. Originally born into a working-class family in Sao Paolo, Brooklyn based artist Vik Muniz’s life changed when he suddenly received the money, after being accidentally shot in a regular favela fight, to break out of his Brazilian poverty and into the art world of New York City in the 1980s.  With this lucky leap to America, Muniz blossomed in the contemporary art scene, beginning his work first in sculpture and later transforming his pieces to photographic reproductions.  Muniz’s work is characterized by his unique choice of artistic medium; rather than classical paints or pastels, he finds inspiration and material in outlandish mediums such as sugar, chocolate syrup, dirt, string, and most recently, trash. It is this fascination with the possibility of the transformative material of trash and its ability to affect change in the lives of the people who work with it that inspired Muniz to return to the memorable impoverished outskirts of Rio de Janiero.

            Stepping away from the restricting realm of fine arts, Muniz plunged into the risk of a two year temporary installation project, in which Muniz started as an American stranger with a large, expensive camera and quickly became a greatly loved and respected artist and friend.  When Muniz first arrived at the Jardim Gramacho landfill, he expected to be executing the portraits of the pickers and recreating his images out of garbage himself; however, after meeting the charming characters drowning in work at the dump, Muniz’s personal project transformed into a life-changing collaboration between picker and artist, art and social justice. In this way, Muniz allowed the landfill’s inspiring individuals, from Suelem, an 18-year-old mother of two who has been picking since she was seven, to the 80-year-old Irma, a grandmotherly resident chef of the landfill cooking up a plat du jour from the freshest ingredients she finds from the heaps of wasted food, to reimagine themselves and their place among the societal structures and boundaries of Rio de Janiero, in addition to offering new life and beauty to hopeless objects unwanted by an ever speedy consumer society.

Tiao posing for his portrait.

            Although each picker we meet throughout the documentary is inspirational and moving in their own personal stories, one of the most profound examples of transformative change inspired by art is seen through the young man Tiao, or by his full name, Sebastiano Carlos dos Santos.  Slaving away at the landfill since the age of eleven, Tiao is now the charismatic leader of the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, a co-operative dedicated to improving and protecting the lives of his fellow pickers and families. Inspiring in himself prior to his artistic revelation with Muniz, Tiao diligently taught himself to be a convincing, influential leader through political texts he found scattered throughout pounds of waste, and with this knowledge, encouraged his workers that organizing could make a difference in their lives and their futures.  When Muniz entered the landfill community, he immediately admired the power of Tiao’s leadership and individual strength, and worked especially hard on Tiao’s portrait as a way to show him just how influential and great he is to gain a renewed sense of self-confidence.  Muniz “painted” an enormous, striking portrait of Tiao in garbage to reflect the famous neoclassical painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, the most famous image of the French Revolution as it provocatively captures the tragic assassination of the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat. By mirroring such a well known portrait in a contemporary way, Muniz was able to both earn much acclaim and attention for his work, while at the same time present Tiao with the once in a lifetime opportunity of traveling to London, experiencing the thrill of a high priced, fast paced art auction, and returning home with $150,000 dollars from the sale of his own portrait to go to his co-operative ARPJD and his family.

Tiao's portait "painted" in trash sold for $150,000 in London.

            It is through this visual and societal comparison of the extremely wealthy and the unhealthily impoverished that the documentary and Muniz’s art pieces are most successful by raising necessary awareness of the unsustainable injustice in cities worldwide. The highly impactful example of a landfill filled to the brim with tons of waste, a deadly result and factor of an a human population exceeding Earth’s healthy capacity, tangibly details the complex intermingling of rich and poor in one urban setting, and their combined impact on the world as whole.  In Rio de Janiero, this landfill is the one place where the rich and poor meet face to face, as the millionaire’s last season sweater lies crumpled next to the poor man’s salvaged supper.  As a common thread throughout cities worldwide, uneven development exacerbates the deepening divide between the rich and poor, leaving almost half of the city in squatter settlements and encroaching temporary housing located in neighborhoods where the environmental health hazards of underdevelopment and industrialization gnaw away at human well-being. This harsh environmental injustice could not be more evident in the shocking visual of a kind looking older woman trudging through toxic, undegradable wastes to pick out the sole recyclable items mindlessly thrown into a garbage can by “sophisticated” well-off people without a second thought.
            Not only are the catadores, or pickers, put in jeopardy each day at work sifting through a sea of decaying remnants of consumerism, but rather their entire lifestyle struggles with the environmental inequalities magnified in the favelas of Brazil, from a lack unclean drinking water to a denial of the toxicity of the air from lethal industrialization. With this dire deficiency of crucial resources, violence and negative stigma spreads rapidly like wildfire throughout an urban youth lacking a simple hope for the future and forced into illegal activities, such as drug and arm trafficking, due to no educational or positive youth activities.  As we quickly move into a crucial era in our urban life to both preserve and ensure a future for our human species on this planet, the often-overlooked injustices of urbanism must be reexamined and incorporated. No longer can sprawl development ignore the realities of city inequality, for crucial environmental solutions cannot exist or succeed without alleviating the urban poor and their forced location in the most ecologically fragile settings.

            By applying their hard-worn hands to build art from the debris rather than continually picking through it, Vik Muniz defined the life of a catadore with new hope and personal dignity. Facing head on the picker’s denial of their sub-human wages and societal fear of change, creating beautiful portraits of themselves permitted the pickers to finally see themselves in a renewed light, one in which they glimpse beyond the dirt and wasted grime. Most importantly, Muniz made sure the world, beyond the Jardim Gramacho favela, appreciated their beauty as well. In reference to his “selfish” contemporary art shifting into the realm of public art, Muniz states, “And as you start taking in you become aware of the public, which is huge. You only do half of it; the other half of the experience is other people. And once you become aware of your responsibility toward your public, it's where you start making work that is really relevant.” Waste Land reminds us of our universal responsibility to each other, and in turn to our planet that gives us life.  As we edge closer to the reality of the deadly consequences our consumer obsessed global society has wrecked on our Earth, it is most crucial to find beauty in the garbage, solitude in the pickers who for them are accustomed to inequality and a life with few resources, and hope in the promising new directions art can take us.


Check out Wasteland at your local theatre or instantly on Netflix. 
View the film's preview and learn more at http://www.wastelandmovie.com/.