Waste Land: The Art of Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz is a contemporary Artist who bases his artwork off of garbage pieces. Vik Muniz is looked at and is said to be by a few people as one of the greatest contemporary artists in the world. When Vik Muniz was younger in his teen years, Vik Muniz encountered a guy shooting him. Shooting him in his leg. According to Vik Muniz, the guy who shot his leg was a very wealthy guy. This guy gave Vik Muniz a lot of cash because it was an accident and he did not want to get in trouble. Vik Muniz's dream was to always become an artist and be able to come to the United States to flourish that dream, so when he got that cash he went ahead and fulfilled his dreams and moved to the United States because Vik Muniz was originally from Brazil. He started to make faces on paper from sugar. Vik Muniz started because it was stated from him that “kids' parents in his home country would grow up just to work 16 hrs each day and not be able to be with their children, so they grew up and as they grew up the sugar gets taken away from them”. It is a long way of saying that their hope and dreams gets taken away. Vik Muniz has a wife and mentions to his wife that he wants to go to Brazil. Vik Muniz's wife was concerned for him as in Brazil those people are fairly poor and he came from there, coming to The United States making lots of money from his art. His wife stated that she is worried about his health because the landfill has bad pollution and he's by a lot of trash and chemicals so you can get sick. Overall she was worried about his safety and considering all the possibilities if he went back home. She questions him “ so are you going to start making drawings out of the garbage?”. Vik Muniz indeed wanted to start making drawings out of garbage. To start, Vik Muniz and his associates visit Brazil. As they arrived it was a bit of an unsettling feeling. Vik Muniz Friend stated “people are looking at us like what are we doing here?. There was garbage and pickers everywhere as they drove through Brazil. Pickers are the people who work long hours like 16 hours a day. As Vik Muniz arrives at the landfill and spends more time there he starts to notice that the pickers aren’t the depressed and mean people he thought they would be. Instead they were all happy to do what they were doing and According to Vik Muniz they were having great conversations with each other. The pickers take out 200 tons of recyclable materials per day from the landfill and According to Kanopy film “it's equivalent to the garbage produced by a big city of 400,000 people". According to Vik Munitz the landfill isn’t that bad. The pickers grab bags to put garbage inside them and they organize it away from the garbage landfill and then they wait for the company to pick it all up. According to Kanopy Film The woman that's working in the landfill prefers plastic bottles and plastic items because it’s a lot lighter. So that’s how the pickers split up plastic items mostly. Later in this film Vik Muniz Meets Zumbi. Zumbi is the board of the association of pickers of Jardim Gramacho. It is stated that the pickers do what they do so their children's future won’t have to go through what they are going through. Instead they want their children to become doctors or lawyers. As said when Vik Muniz said the children would grow up the sugar would get taken away because a lot of them weren’t getting that chance to become doctors and lawyers. According to Zumbi a lot of people weren’t supporting the picker association. A lot of others were saying it would be worthless. But he wanted to change that when he went outside and saw kids picking up garbage. Books were thrown away. The pickers would have saved the books so that people could know how to read and they’ll have knowledge which is completely understandable. According to the pickers. Glass to them is 0.70$ per kilo and tarp cost is 0.40$ per kilo. Usually they don't pick up as much glass. At the end of the kanopy film Vik Munitz stood up on a high level from the ground and watched as the pickers made an art piece out of just garbage cans, clothing, and plastics. That art piece were people's faces built from scraps recycling material. Pictures were made out of the piece that was built on the land. A strong quote that will stick to the viewer is that At the end Zumbi says “ They are not pickers of garbage that’s not what I would call it but they are pickers of recycled materials, Garbage cannot be reused”.
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