Lucy Walkers, Waste Land

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil is home to one of the largest wastelands in the world. In Lucy Walkers, Waste Land (2010), she gives insight into the lives that exist amongst that garbage and what little inspiration they have left for life. In order to provide the Catadores (pickers) of Jardim Gramacho (community/garbage tip) with a new found motivation for a better way of living, Walker, along with the infamous artist, Vik Muniz and his team, travel to Rio De Janeiro to put to practice the concept of turning someone’s trash into another persons treasure. Some of the main issues and ideas represented in Waste Land, run parallel with Dziga Vertov’s perception of the world, who says, ‘My path is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world.

She uses Vik’s art in it’s simplest form in order to develop a greater understanding for fine materials and how they may be trash to some, but life changing for others. She uses the technique of zooming into these finer materials in order to really mature one’s understanding of her intended reading which tells of how something as raw as rubbish can be compiled to create something that is treasured by people, who have been surround by that exact material for their entire lives but never understood it’s true potential until their perceptions of it were shifted. Walkers intended reading presents great resemblance to Vertov’s statement that says ‘thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.’ An example of this could be seen through artist, Vik Muniz who at first, had no appreciation for recyclable materials until he was exposed to its importance at Jardim Gramacho. The pickers of garbage were able to show him a world he never knew, and thus, he was able to re evaluate the life he currently lived. After returning home from his experience at Jardim Gramacho, Muniz says, “These days I’m starting to see things in a simpler way. I don’t have as much material ambition as I used to. When I was poor I only wanted material things, I just wanted to have things.” Before his project, Muniz strived for risk and adventure, whereas now, as shown in this example, Walker presents Vik Muniz to be a more stripped down, educated, simpler version of the man he was before he left, and this came as a result of the new world he discovered in Rio De Janeiro and how it made him reconsider the simplicity of his own life, which runs parallel with Vertov’s declaration. By analysing these two concepts side by side, it becomes clear that Walkers intentions are to show how being exposed to a world you never understood can ultimately improve your own quality of living as