That's trash!

 

 

Every Wednesday morning, I roll the trash and recycling bins out to the curb, and sometime during the day, Republic Trash takes the contents to another part of the city, but I have no idea where they go.

When I was a kid, in the early 1950’s, we did not have garbage trucks that went through the alley – but we did have a milkman, who came to the house a couple of times a week.

 Dad had a 50-gallon drum at the end of the driveway that he used to burn paper and household garbage. He saved up the large items, and every month or so he would load them into the trunk of his 1948 Chevrolet, and we would make a trip to “the dump”, which was an area or low-lying land just uphill from the Mississippi river, and a mile or so from Mounds Park.

There are plenty of people today who would consider modern art to be trash. In the case of a Brazil-born artist named Vik Muniz, they would be more correct than you might think.

Vik Muniz (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈvik muˈnis]; born 1961) is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional materials such as tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, dirt, etc., Muniz creates works of art, referencing old master's paintings and celebrity portraits, among other things, and then photographs them. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently represented by Galeria Nara Roesler based in New York and Brazil.

In 2010, Muniz was featured in the documentary film Waste Land. Directed by Lucy Walker, the film highlights Muniz's work in one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film was nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vik_Muniz

I monitored an art class earlier this week, and we watched “Waste Land”.

Filmed over nearly three years, Waste Land follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jarim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic army of catadores – or garbage pickers. The catadores are the ultimate marginalized population: unemployed in any traditional sense of the word, they resort to picking valuable recyclable materials from the garbage thrown away by those in Brazil more fortunate than themselves. But they display remarkably good spirits and camaraderie in the face of their lot in life, forming friendships and in the case of the elderly Valter, declaring the crucial and meaningful role they play in remediating the results of the modern culture of overconsumption and careless disposal. Under the leadership of the young, charismatic picker Tiao, they have even created a co-operative to pool their labor and resources to maximize their income.

Muniz spent three years interviewing and photographing the workers at the landfill.

Muniz doesn’t just talk about the transformative power of art; he puts it into action in Brazil. He decides that all proceed from the photographs he creates of the finished pieces go back to the catadores, which they use to improve their living conditions, go to school, invest in the co-op, keep their trucks in working order, and even build a library. The pickers report that the project has helped lift some of the social stigma surrounding their profession, and the Brazilian government is now using the film to promote recycling.

Some of the people who worked at the landfill for decades, and most of them had little, if any education – but they all took pride in their work.

About a year before the landfill closed, filmmaker Luck Walker posted her comments about the place, which you can read at the link below:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/20/worlds-largest-rubbish-dump-brazil

If you want to watch the documentary, you can view at Kanopy.com. You’ll need a library card to set up an account, but after that you can view 5 movies a month for free.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pimalibrary/

 There are two conclusion that you can draw from the documentary.

One is that garbage, when displayed property, can be a thing of beauty.

The second is that even one man, using his creativity, can make a huge difference in the lives of hundreds of people.