{"id":6525,"date":"2013-02-25T07:22:04","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T12:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=6525"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:04:47","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:04:47","slug":"vik-muniz-his-waste-pickers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/02\/25\/vik-muniz-his-waste-pickers\/","title":{"rendered":"Vik Muniz &amp; his waste pickers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Here are my introductory comments to the 2010 documentary <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wastelandmovie.com\/\">Waste Land<\/a>,<em> delivered yesterday at the Fleming Museum in Burlington and shown in connection with the exhibition <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/~fleming\/index.php?category=exhibitions&amp;page=high_trash\">High Trash,<\/a> which runs until May 19. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"WASTE LAND Official Trailer\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/16290358?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Every society implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that things have an ending, and that that ending is part of a larger set of continuities. In medieval Europe, the ending was death, and the continuity was resurrection and the Life Eternal, modeled after Christ\u2019s and made possible by Him. In Classic Mayan society, the ending and the continuity were more or less the same: they were the recirculation of blood and life-force from one body to another, with the help of the gods. Death was only transformation, and self-sacrifice was prized.<\/p>\n<p>In industrial capitalism, things end up in one place: the Waste Dump.<\/p>\n<p>But that end is generally unacknowledged; its acknowledgment would reveal that the system itself is a system of unsustainable excess. It is excess production that allows for capital accumulation and growth; it is excess consumption that enables that production. Unlike the Mayans, our life-force isn\u2019t blood; it\u2019s petroleum, gas, and coal. And running through them all, it is desire &#8212; the desire for things.<\/p>\n<p>As long as those things, when they meet their natural end, are relegated to some far-off place, the fuel that runs the system keeps on pumping. Among those far-off places are the Great Pacific Garbage Patch &#8212; at least two of which float around in the middle of Pacific Ocean, consisting of some 100 million tons of plastic and other debris.<\/p>\n<p>More prosaically, there are our waste dumps &#8212; which is what this film is about.<\/p>\n<p>As Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart point out in their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cradle-Remaking-Way-Make-Things\/dp\/1400157617\">Cradle-to-Cradle model<\/a> of industrial ecology, waste is food. And as Indian sages have told us for centuries, nothing ends except to recirculate in new forms. <i>Waste Land <\/i>focuses on two forms of such recirculation.<\/p>\n<p>The first is <em>waste turned into recycled material.<\/em> The film is about the pickers and reclaimers of the largest waste dump in the world, Jardim Gramacho outside Rio de Janeiro.<\/p>\n<p>Recycling is about the adding of value to that which has lost it \u2013 it\u2019s a market opportunity, and in this sense the recyclers of Jardim Gramacho are on the lowest rung, but still on a rung, of the capitalist production machine. They are the bottom-feeders in the pyramid scheme of consumer capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>But recycling has always had its poetry, and this film \u2013 like Agnes Varda\u2019s <i>The Gleaners and I<\/i>, about wastepickers on French farms, and like the found-footage films or \u201crecycled cinema\u201d of Bruce Conner and others \u2013 is a celebration of that poetry. The archetype here might be Anais Nin\u2019s ragpicker, in her short story \u201cRagtime\u201d \u2013 which I\u2019ll quote from in a moment.<\/p>\n<p>The second form of recirculation is<em> waste turned into art.<\/em> Here\u2019s where the ironies begin.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, the art itself has a multi-levelled beauty: not only in the traditional visual sense, but in the richness of meanings Vik Muniz is playing with, the beauty of <em>materials<\/em> and of<em> process.<\/em> His art counts among the best of the high-profile socially-engaged and community-based art of recent years.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, there\u2019s the system of valuation that allows a few artists like Muniz to rise up above the fold \u2013 a world of art stars, mega-auctions, and the neoliberal \u201centerprise culture\u201d by which nations and cities with their \u201ccreative industries\u201d policies clamor for attention to the globetrotting moneyed class. None of this is particularly questioned by the film; director Lucy Walker allows us to come to our own judgments. But it\u2019s pretty clear that many of Muniz\u2019s own wastepicker-subjects see through that system, even if they get drawn into it in the end.<\/p>\n<p>Insofar as the film celebrates Muniz as hero who has made it in an art world that some might think is a model of monumental excess \u2013 and now reaches out to a handful of those he left behind, the film ought to make us ask: What about all the other wastepickers and bottom-feeders, the 4000 other <i>catadores<\/i> of Jardim Gramacho, and the multi-million strong \u201cglobal precariat,\u201d who don\u2019t have such a benevolent patron to raise them out of their precarious existence?<\/p>\n<p>Philosopher Felix Guattari has argued that environmental politics must take into account three parallel but intersecting ecologies: the \u201cenvironmental\u201d ecology of material substances, the social ecology of human relations, and the mental or perceptual ecology that ties the others together in patterns of meaning, perception, sense-making, and self-making. This film addresses all three levels.<\/p>\n<p>It is about the material ecology of production and consumption \u2013 the turning of objects of desire into junk, waste, smelly decaying stuff \u2013 and even if films aren\u2019t truly haptic or olfactory, you can almost smell the stuff if you try.<\/p>\n<p>And it is about those who scrape out a living at the terminal end of that production cycle, amidst the toxic debris the rest of us leave behind. In this, it is about social ecology: about class, the reclaiming of human dignity, and the possibility \u2013 but unlikelihood \u2013 of mobility in a hierarchic class system \u2013 though in this one might ask if it plays a variation on the \u201cextreme makeover\u201d genre of Reality TV: <i>Who Wants to be an Art Star?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>And as a film about art, and about the artistic alchemy that allows industrial refuse and those who deal with it to be transfigured into objects of beauty, it is about perceptual ecology. Any film that shows us where things end up and asks us to account for those things is inviting us to change our perception of the world around us. I invite you to do that as you watch.<\/p>\n<p>[At this point I read <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/07\/persuasions-of-the-historians-ragpickers-craft\/\">an excerpt from Anais Nin&#8217;s &#8220;Ragtime&#8221;<\/a> and mentioned a few factual details about the film.\u00a0The film&#8217;s genre is part trash\/recycling film (<em>Gleaners and I<\/em>), part art (and art-heist) film (<em>Exit Through the Out Door, Man On Wire<\/em>), part eco-doc (<em>Manufactured Landscapes,<\/em> which is really all three as well). I recommend it.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are my introductory comments to the 2010 documentary Waste Land, delivered yesterday at the Fleming Museum in Burlington and shown in connection with the exhibition High Trash, which runs until May 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689354],"tags":[5431,348,353,352,16801,49510,49509],"class_list":["post-6525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-image_nation","tag-art","tag-capitalism","tag-documentary","tag-film","tag-recycling","tag-trash","tag-vik-muniz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1Hf","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13850,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/01\/11\/burning-moment\/","url_meta":{"origin":6525,"position":0},"title":"Burning moment","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 11, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Watching Onscene.tv\u2019s continuous, commentary-free footage of the fires in and around Los Angeles is like watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony. 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What's little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Politics&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/_38eVyMfag0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6991,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/10\/23\/documenting-the-act-of-killing\/","url_meta":{"origin":6525,"position":2},"title":"Documenting the act of killing","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The following is reblogged, excerpted and modified, from e\u00b2mc. http:\/\/youtu.be\/1kssnOoJ93I How do films deal with historical atrocities? And how might they enable them in the first place? The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer's chilling documentary about the perpetrators of the mass murders committed by the Suharto regime's paramilitary death\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/1kssnOoJ93I\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2605,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/02\/11\/examining-life-trash-radical-nature\/","url_meta":{"origin":6525,"position":3},"title":"Examining life, trash, &amp; radical nature","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU I enjoyed Astra Taylor's film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I'm glad to see that it bears re-viewing. As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/iGCfiv1xtoU\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":6525,"position":4},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Academe&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1230,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/06\/space-junk-the-relational-real\/","url_meta":{"origin":6525,"position":5},"title":"space junk &amp; the (relational) Real","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wzUYiOV2-kE?fs=1&hl=en_US (This post spun off from the last, where I concluded by noting the increasing amount of debris out in the upper atmosphere. Somehow I couldn't resist pulling that image into the vortex of ecopolitics and the objects-relations debate, which is carrying on at hyper tiling, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Larval Subjects,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/wzUYiOV2-kE\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6525"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6538,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6525\/revisions\/6538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}