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| 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.
