Daily Archives: April 24, 2018

The Wasteland Questions

Q1: From a moral standpoint, do you think Vik’s project was acceptable?

Throughout the film, I struggled with the morality of the project that Vik was pursuing. While he did end up giving the money he raised to the people he photographed, I couldn’t get over the sense that they were being exploited to some degree, and that the project was more important for Vik than it was for the subjects, and to a degree, he was doing it to prove to himself he had moved past being that poor kid growing up in a Sao Paulo favela. To that end, it still felt exploitative despite the positive effects that it had on the subjects.

Q2: What do the subjects of Vik’s photographs reveal about how class interacts with race and gender in Brazil?

Looking at his subjects, they were largely non-white and female, with several of the women experiencing some sort of gender-violence. As such, it is clear that poverty in Brazil is disproportionately felt by non-white individuals and women.

Wasteland discussion questions

Wasteland on Vik Muniz’s journey to Rio de Janeiro was about people who worked on trash picking, which they recycled those reusable materials and reassembled the waste. In Brazil, the problem of decomposing garbage has been a problem, as they took up the land available and were hard to decompose. Those trash pickers in the documentary are from the Brazilian working class and make a living through this job.
To reflect on the documentary, I would like to raise two discussion questions: How did the trash picking job change the people in the documentary? What is the impact of Vik Muniz’s photography project domestically and internationally? The participants of the documentary are from working class and live in favelas outside of Rio de Janeiro. Some of them experienced unemployment in the whole family, and this job gave them a way to support their daily life as their job. Some of them were in poverty as single mothers, and this job provided an opportunity to change their lives, as they did not need to be involved in prostitution. For the head of the organization, reallocating the waste and recycle the materials would help the environment and make use of more land available, so it would not be taken by the trash. The trash picking job overall granted the characters opportunities to change their environment, and their life, which they could make a living through the job and this career gave them another option over drug trafficking or prostitution.
Vik Muniz’s photography utilized trash for aesthetic values initially as most of them went into waste. Nevertheless, by taking pictures of trash pickers, they revealed their struggles and raised audiences’ awareness of reallocating waste. The organization started for this was doubted by the mass on the effectiveness of the environmentally friendly behavior, but after the photos and artworks were displayed in Brazil and even globally, waste allocation and working class people were more present in the media, which as a result brought more attention to the Brazilians. Vik Muniz also gained higher recognition in art internationally.

Wasteland Discussion Questions

One question I have about the film Wasteland is about Vik. While I thought the project he pursued doing was admirable, there was something about him which rubbed me the wrong way, that I couldn’t really pin down while watching the film. I don’t know if it was his ego per say, but perhaps something along the lines. I guess the question I’m asking is if other people who watched the movie also picked up on the vibe I’m attempting to convey. Perhaps more specifically it seemed like he didn’t want to entertain or hear potential criticism about the project.

Another question I have about the film is the scope of the project. While we saw Vik help a handful of the workers at the landfill, there were multitudes of those who were not focused on. How do you think the people who were left out of the project help? and do you think that the lasting effects of the project for the few benefitted the whole?

The Wasteland Question Post

1.) How many of the children (percentage) of the pickers come back and support their families in the Picker Operations? I recall that the one guy at the beginning (I forget his name) wanted his future child to be a lawyer to help protect their rights.

2.) In the art produced by Vic Muniz, how did it improve the morale of the Pickers at the landfill? It didn’t really touch on it a whole lot in my opinion.