What we can learn from scavengers

It's interesting how popular culture works, with works of a particular theme seeming to cluster together. Or perhaps the clustering is in the mind of the viewer only - having seen one piece of work, another similar piece is filtered from the noise for special attention.

This happened to me where, within the space of a couple of months, I saw the trailer for an upcoming documentary called Landfill Harmonic, and watched a full documentary called Waste Land. They seemed to stumble into my consciousness.





Both movies are about waste scavengers in South America (Paraguay and Brazil respectively). In both cases, the scavengers live on and around landfills, earning their money by pulling recyclable materials directly from the landfill. It is an unsanitary, unsafe and economically unstable environment into which some people are forced through life's circumstances.

And in both cases, the stories were about people in the communities making what might be considered "high art" from their lives. The stories are uplifting, humanising people who might ordinarily be written off as the dregs of society - losers who somehow deserve the station they have found themselves in.

Indeed, that perception could be hardened by their own stories, generally stories of bad luck and bad decisions leading into a descent from lower middle class life into the life of a scavenger (which is considered, in turn, to be a cut above the prostitutes or drug dealers). But that isn't the message of the videos. They show the scavengers as people making the best of their situation, and then flowering when given the opportunity.

Landfill Harmonic

Landfill Harmonic is about scavengers making orchestral instruments from waste, enabling children in the village to learn classical music with their instruments.

It is not just a journey of hope, but also a story of reinvesting new narratives into waste itself. An oil drum turned into a cello, sheet metal fashioned into violins. The new narrative forces us to rethink how we see waste. This process of rethinking waste is also a strong part of Gay Hawkins' The Ethics of Waste, a playful book that is well worth the read.

Waste Land

Waste Land is also about the creation of works of art from waste, in this case iconic photographs of scavengers taken by the artist Vik Muniz.

The photographs are rendered into enormous artworks on the floor of a warehouse, with the initial image recreated using waste materials. The artwork piece is then photographed and exhibited. Again, the value of waste is revisited - bottle tops emerge as the instrument for drawing fine lines, waste materials are used cleverly to create shading and texture in the pictures. The physical act of recreating the images is done by the photograph subjects themselves. It is a poetic expression of their everyday job - creating value from waste.

Imagination. Waste. Life.

To be sure, there is real art in the work, but the larger story (to me) is about how the people themselves can be elevated from waste to art, or valueless to invaluable. That is a beautiful story, and worth restating over and over. It's perhaps part of the reason why I continue to be fascinated by the prospect of a world without waste. People, and materials, should be given the opportunity to reach their full potential. We shouldn't be turning our back on anything for a simple lack of imagination.

And, most importantly, the stories show the importance of imagination in bridging the divide between waste and art. It is through imagination that we create life from waste.