The iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer stands with his arms outstretched to the south. His back is turned to the north edge of Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay, the site of Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest garbage dump. This 321-acre site receives 7,000 tons of garbage daily--70% of the trash produced by Rio de Janeiro and surrounding areas.
Around 3,000 - 5,000 catadores work (unemployed in any traditional sense of the word) on the landfill, eking out an existence (although, only 1,752 are officially registered). They remove 200 tons of recyclable materials each day--collecting and selling scrap metal and other recyclables. (Their work has extended the life of the landfill by removing materials that would have otherwise been buried.)
This group of catadores (called simply, pickers) is a part of a squatter community (the favela of Jardim Gramacho) surrounding the landfill, now home to over 15,000 people. And the description of this favela? "Check out the geography of this thing. It's like the end of the line. It's where everything not good goes, including the people."
Okay. If you gave me a free evening and my druthers, I'd probably not choose a documentary about a garbage dump. Give me 007 and a good bottle of wine any day. Even so, I watched Waste Land, and now, for whatever reason, I cannot shake it.
Garbage is not a subject for a Sabbath Moment.
Why would it be?
We prefer not to think about garbage.
It would be better if we didn't know about any of this.
Or, didn't look at it.
We live in a world that looks askance at anything tattered or shabby or discarded or disconcerting or unnerving.
Vik Muniz--the passion behind Waste Land--is a Brazilian artist known for using unconventional materials to create portraits of marginalized people. He set out to "paint" the catadores with the garbage they spent their days sorting through. Mr. Muniz eventually transforms their images into classical portraits, which he models in his studio with their help, using garbage they have scavenged from Gramacho.
This could be just an eco-film, until we meet the catadores. They include Tião Santos, president of the workers' cooperative Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho; the scholarly Zumbi, who has educated himself by reading discarded books; Suellem, a teenage mother who has worked at Gramacho and lived in its shantytown since her childhood; and Magna, who became a catador when she and her husband fell on hard times. And, as Magna says, "It's better than turning tricks at Copacabana." Muniz's work becomes collaboration with the catadores themselves.
No, I don't live in a dump. But I do get the part about being marginalized.
And I know we all have a choice: we can view things close in or further away.
We can fear people from afar or we can interact with them.
And if we do... we may be changed fundamentally and permanently.
I listened to Isis, a striking, angel-faced young picker who's suffered a string of tragedies, declare, "I don't see myself as trash anymore. I don't want to go back to the garbage."
Yes. That's what happens when the labels are removed. It takes courage, whether I am removing the label from someone else... or from myself.
Because here's the deal: "The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it." (Muniz)
That is the way labels work, isn't it?
They distance us. They marginalize.
Whether it is something I don't understand or don't like or can't see.
Or whether it is the garbage in someone else, or the garbage in me.
Eve Ensler writes in Insecure at Last, about working with a group of woman at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She knew these women would be tough, difficult. And that every one was there because of a mistake. And it occurred to her that we have frozen each woman in her mistake. Marked her forever and held her captive.
"Mistakes do not have faces of feelings or histories of futures. They are bad. Mistakes. We must forget them, put them away. Then I came to Bedford. Slowly I began to meet the mistakes, one by one. They had soft, delicate voices, strong hands, beautiful faces, feisty spirits, outrageous laughs. These mistakes were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews--they had fantasies and toothaches and bad moods and funky T-shirts. There was the mistake and the woman."
It's so easy to fuel the fire of misunderstanding and intolerance and small-mindedness when I witness all of this through the lens of my own labels.
I do know that when we label, we tend to exclude, rather than include.
The process in Waste Land is spellbinding. Muniz photographs the pickers individually at the landfill itself, and then projects the images he's captured onto the floor of a massive warehouse nearby. Then he works with the catadores to gather recyclable items from the dump and use these discarded things to recreate the images on the floor. In the end, vibrant, complex, and essentially human portraits emerge, revealing both dignity and despair as the catadores begin to re-imagine their lives. Muniz doesn't just talk about the transformative power of art, but puts it into action in Brazil. (He decides that all proceeds 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.)
"Sometimes we see ourselves as so small," Tião Santos tells reporters at an art auction in London where his 'portrait' is sold, "but people out there see us as so big, so beautiful."
I know that many of our global problems are complicated by political nuances, but I grow very weary of our notion that solutions begin by shouting one another down. It is no surprise that the weight of the world's malaise--complete with political-pundit-noise-pollution--adds stress to our own daily quandaries.
Is change possible?
Yes it is.
And it starts one choice at a time.
"I grew up poor," Mr. Muniz says. "Now I've reached the point where I want to give back."So do I.
