Waste Land

It’s not a such big step from art made from found objects to art made from recycled garbage, but the scale on which Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born sculptor and visual artist Vik Muniz works in the absorbing documentary Waste Land makes it look and feel like a walk to the moon.

Muniz’s palette in the creation of a series of billboard-sized portraits – later shrunk to reasonable sizes via photographic processes – is unfathomably huge: the world’s biggest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, established 40 years ago on a landfill island north of Rio de Janeiro.

Muniz, a prolific and hugely successful artist whose high-tech studio is itself a wonder to behold, is no stranger to large canvases. Previous works include hearts inscribed in the ozone by skywriters, and massive ‘drawings’ of everyday objects whose outlines – trenches dug by bulldozers in Brazilian soil – can only be seen in their proper dimensions from a plane.

The Jardim Gramacho portrait project, which required the artist to be on site for two years, is particularly engaging because Muniz’s subjects were chosen from among the hundreds of catadores  – garbage pickers – who earn a not-so-indecent living from scouring the spectacular dump for recyclables which are sold to a variety of manufacturers as raw material.

The site is a city unto itself, complete with a governing body of elected pickers, housing for the temporarily homeless, a sprawling communal ‘kitchen’ supplied with comestibles that haven’t quite reached their sell-by dates, and an apparently principled and humane social order.

It is otherworldly in a sense, if for no other reason than the citizens are, for the most part, ill-equipped for employment and unentitled to support elsewhere. Yet in this unimaginable, alien mess they have found work, self-respect, a degree of comfort, and friends. Like the environment that nourishes them, they are part of Rio’s unwanted stuff, and, like characters in some new millennial Dickensian novel, they make fascinating character studies.

Muniz’s chosen few slowly reveal themselves on camera as stoic survivors of tragedy, poverty, violence or abuse. The women are particularly proud of being pickers; their only other viable alternative is prostitution. One man, too poor for schooling, has been able to gain a substantial education by reading discarded literature.

Surrounded by the garbage that sustains them, the subjects are asked to strike poses resembling those in several classic portraits. Muniz then draws huge outlined images onto the floor of an on-site ‘studio’ and has the subjects fill in colours, textures and shading from piles of pre-selected waste.

As the work moves towards completion, it becomes apparent to Muniz and his team that the act of creation is beginning to transform his subjects, who are now allowing themselves to dream of existence outside the oppressive Jardim Gramacho.

Director Walker intuitively seizes on their debate. Do these rich, expat interlopers have the right to interfere in the lives of these catadores, implanting impossible hopes of recognition, even fame? She follows Muniz and four of his subjects to exhibitions in London and Rio, where the paintings are sold for phenomenal amounts of money that are, in turn, handed back to the pickers’ communal organization.

What happens to these outcasts when they’re transported into Muniz’s cozy, elegant universe is Waste Land’s big payoff, a cathartic finale that magnificently reinforces the notion that art, on every imaginable level, enriches and elevates human experience.

– Greg Quill, The Toronto Star