Waste Land

Inspired by an encounter with Jardim Gramacho, once one of the largest landfills in the world, Waste Land (2010) follows Brazilian artist Vik Muniz as he works with catadores (men and women who make a living sorting recyclable materials) to create large-scale portraits composed of discarded objects. Attentive to process rather than spectacle, the film dwells on the slow, collective labor through which waste is sorted, arranged, photographed, and transformed, while foregrounding the voices and self-understandings of the workers themselves.

As the film moves between the intimate scale of individual lives, the overwhelming spatial scale of the landfill, and the global circuits of contemporary art in which the finished images circulate, Waste Land reflects on how value is produced through shifts in scale. What counts as refuse or resource, invisibility or recognition, depends on where one stands. In tracing these movements, the film invites viewers to consider how environmental harm, artistic authorship, and social dignity are unevenly distributed across local, national, and transnational scales.

The film will be introduced by Elizabeth Barrios, an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Albion College and one of this year's Society for the Humanities Fellows.

Free admission! Sponsored by the Society for the Humanities as part of our "Scale on Screen" film series.

Part of our "Scale on Screen" series. In English and Portuguese with English subtitles. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Films.