Garbage and Leftover People

Anthropocenic discourse has become increasingly popular within social and ecological fields lately. Although its official date as a geological time scale is yet to be established, it is indisputable that we do live in the Anthropocene Era, when humans’ behavior—not nature’s—plays the biggest role to change the face and climate of the earth. And for the last 200 years, the anthropocene’s manifestation is inevitably the industrial capitalistic society. With its entire production and consumption patterns, industrial capitalism everywhere will lead to its ultimate residue: garbage—the final residue that as a matter of fact drives the talk of anthropocenic discourse at first to its crucial point. And that’s what will become the curatorial theme of South American program in ARKIPEL social/capital this 2016: garbage as the end and the beginning of social/capital struggle, garbage both in social and physical meanings, and how the two are closely tied.

Garbage is a big problem of Latin American cities. It is not a coincidence that some debut films that lead to the Latin American New Cinema breakthrough in the end of 1950s to the early 1960s raise the subject of garbage. As a part of the effort to show a Latin American reality as it is (within the bigger framework of liberation movements), there have been documentaries such as Cantegriles (1958) and Tire dié (1958/1960). The eight minutes long Cantegriles by Alberto Miler (Uruguay) straighforwardly juxtaposes the pictures of luxurious housing complex of Cantegril Country Club in Punta del Este, Uruguay, to the slum area around the garbage dump (which is called mockingly by the rich as the poor’s “cantegriles”). Meanwhile, Tire dié is recorded in Santa Fe, Argentine, by the filmmaker Fernando Birri and his students of the Santa Fee School of Documentary for three years—the project they call “survey film” with a final version of 33 minutes long.[1] Cantegriles show the contrast between the rich and slum area in Punta del Este, while Tire dié balances the concern over subjects at the location and the economic-political system (social/capital) underlying it, which can be most easily seen from its way of taking long shots from above to position Tire dié entirely in the middle of Santa Fe. These two films become pioneers, even models, of social documentary films later on, such as Boca do Iixo (1993) by Edouardo Coutinho from Brazil.

The attitude over garbage thus needs a view that’s more than just a technical-technocratic one on how to minimalize industrial and consumptive wastes. The attitude over garbage thus also needs the attitude over people and the poverty surrounding them.[2] Two documentary films incorporate art intervention as the main element of the approach. Landfill Harmonic (2015)—screened here—tells how a scavenger society in the area of Cateura landfill, Paraguay, with the help of an orchestra conductor, creates musical instruments of the available garbage, learns about music, and becomes humanized mentally and physically. It is noteworthy that a similar theme has been raised in the film Waste Land (2010) that tells a story of how a scavenger society in the biggest landfill area of the world,[3] Jardim Gramacho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with the help of an artist and photographer, creates visual arts from the available garbage, learns about art, and becomes humanized mentally and physically. Of  course these kinds of film are praised and popular in the “First World” because they console the miserable hearts of Western audiences who might have been extremely heavy due to the white men’s burden. They see how finally the Western civilization (Western classical music, Western art canons) can bring goodness for this marginalized groups. I don’t doubt the benefit of such art intervention approach, although the premise to make it a long term solution economically and politically is still much too utopian.

At the end of the other side, I chose the short documentary, the 12 minutes long Ilha das Flores (1989) by Jorge Furtado from Brazil. With its creative montage over photographic and footage material, to me this is the most apt and poignant film which discusses garbage as residue of the global capitalistic consumption and production, and the “leftover people” who must exist as an inherent part of the system. Furtado does not present beautiful dreams that there would be a sweet way out of this.

Comparing the two films, I expect to provide a reflection and a certain contrast in the Latin America program this year. Thus if the last paragraph of this semantic introduction of ARKIPEL 2016 mentions how social/capital has merged the citizens’ status “in a new (global) world without—or with vaguely—memories of state”, then the two films above are going to present that picture in its two extreme poles: the community who “eats” from the garbage and that who literally eats the garbage, the two of which closely intertwining through the work of global capitalism that makes the state seem to be absent both in and outside the screen—not even vaguely.

[1] The area of Tire dié landfill got its name from the phrase “Tire diez!” (“Give me ten cents!”) shouted by children whenever a train passes by, just like my peers back in kampong in East Java shouting “Give me money!” as a plane soars by.

[2] It is worth to mention here that the documentary Cartoneros (2006) by Ernesto Livon-Grosman, raising paper waste and recycle without presenting the cliché picture of dirty scavengers living around the mountains of garbage. The film’s context is Buenos Aires in the early 2000s when the economic crisis and the impact of systematic corruption bankrupted the state and drove the middle class to survive as scavengers of paper, carton, and box (“cartoneros”).

[3] Carlos Fuentes in his novel La Silla del Águila (2003) refer to Mexico City as “basurero el más grande del mundo” (“the largest landfills in the world”). Factually, he was mistaken.