Having just declared this as a blog to focus on the arts in Detroit, I am veering off to mention a documentary film called Waste Land (2010) shown this past week the DIA’s Detroit Film Theatre. I found this film truly inspiring and a real testimony to the power of art to open hearts and minds. Images from Waste Land remain sharp in my mind – as does the uplifting story it tells of an extraordinary, collaborative art project organized by internationally recognized Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, in a favela (a sprawling slum) just outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The film documents Muniz's amazing art project, an art project generous of heart and designed to change people’s lives through involving them personally in the creative process.
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Vik Muniz at Jardim Gramacho Photo Credit: Vik Muniz Studio |
Over a three-year period, Muniz worked in Jardim Gramacho, an enormous landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and one of the largest garbage dumps in the world. There, Muniz invited the trust and the collaboration of catadores (garbage pickers) and photographed these impoverished and socially marginalized people as they daily combed the landfill searching for saleable recyclables. In photographing the catadores, Muniz came to know them, to know their hopes and dreams, to appreciate their strength and dignity, and, with them, to reveal the face of poverty and human cost of massive environmental waste.
Using his signature artistic technique of reworking his photographs as large scale drawings made of non-traditional materials (in the case, recyclable trash) and re-photographing the drawings, Muniz created large scale art photographs of the catadores, often positioning the catadores in poses recaling familiar images from Western art history – echoes of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, Edouard Degas’ Woman Ironing, etc..
For the catadores, the experience of working with Muniz over a sustained period and, later, the public recognition they received because of the art was life-changing – transforming their sense of themselves and enlarging their world beyond the favela and the landfill. Through their share of revenues from the sale of art and film distribution, the project contributed as well to the economic stability of their fragile lives and their community.
Muniz’ art has had a powerful effect on the viewing public touched by this art as well. His seductively engaging images displayed in major art institutions bring attention to the dignity of the poor. Before Muniz brought the catadores of Jardim Gramacho to public attention, these marginalized workers had been overlooked by most of society and considered expendable, much like the trash they scavenged. Through Muniz’ over-sized photographic images, these people themselves - these human beings – are seen and their voices heard.
