$2/day - On knowing what's out there

Brett asked me the other day if I wanted to go to a Phish concert this weekend. "They put on a really good show, I hear!" he said. In reply, I said that I couldn't, because I couldn't afford to (this week, at least) as I am living on two dollars a day. I realised that this was probably the first time I said no to something because I couldn't afford to go. As I mentioned previously, I have never felt the shortage of money. In our world today, what that means is that I haven't felt the shortage of the opportunity to experience something. It is clear to me that money provides opportunities. If you are wealthy, you can have a summer home in the British Virgin Islands. One of the primary reasons you are able to have that home is because of the doors opened to you, the access granted to you, because of the money you have. What that means is that money opens doors, and a lack of money tends to keep them shut.

I thought about this experience with Brett, knowing all well that the concert was actually going on, yet I couldn't go. I didn't feel bad about it, because I know I'll get the opportunity to go to a concert next week, when I'm not living on two dollars a day. But what if that opportunity to go to a concert never came back to me because I just didn't have the money to go to it? I started to wonder what it must be like then to know everything that is going on around you, yet being unable to access those experiences. I thought about what it must be like to be a homeless person sitting outside the Michigan Theatre, or Hill Auditorium, seeing people all dressed up going in, after eating at Silvio's or some other nice place. There are a couple of things you might be feeling at that point, I assume (I assume, because I don't really know.) - 1) you might have previously been able to afford to go to a concert and dinner, you know what doing that is like like, and you maybe miss doing so and/or feel bad about the fact that you can no longer afford to do so, or 2) you may never have been able to afford to do so, and so maybe you don't know what it is really like, but you know that it probably feels good to be able to afford to do so.

(Spoiler alert!) One of the most fascinating scenes of the movie Waste Land, which I wrote about previously, is the discussion that Vik, his wife, and his colleague are having when the time comes to decide whether or not someone that works as a picker at a landfill should be flown out to London for an auction, since the piece that is being auctioned (made by Vik) features the picker. Vik's wife is initially opposed to taking the picker to London. "How do you think it would feel to go to into this glamourous world for just a couple of days, and then end up going back to a landfill in Rio?" she asks. Vik then raises the valid point that if he was poor, and someone came to him with an offer to move out of poverty for a week, knowing all well that you'll end up back where you came from, that he would of course take up the offer. The picker does end up going to London, and sees the art piece featuring him fetch fifty thousand dollars at auction. In the same way, I suspect that some people that have been disenfranchised and have ended up living on very little money have actually had experiences they wish they could continue to have, yet are not empowered by money. (That is not to say that these people are not happy, because I don't really know. Maybe they are.)

This week has been a fascinating experience, and has given me much to think about.

Feature: Waste Land, Vik Muniz, and consciousness

(Potential spoiler alert!) There has been much written about trash and waste, and it seems like there are several documentaries and books about this issue. I have been almost saturated with thinking about trash, with my creativity being challenged day by day in trying to write about trash from different perspectives. I am not the most creative person out there. But other people are much more creative, and have different backgrounds that lends them different ways of viewing the exact thing I have been thinking about now for ten months (ten months today!). It is always wonderful to come across these thoughts, visions and projects, and I came across one just a couple weekends ago.

Matt and I made it to The Detroit Institute of Arts for the Detroit Film Theatre, where they show beautiful movies, documentaries, and shorts, on the 16th of January. What caught my eye was a screening of the documentary Waste Land, which is about an art project (turned out to be way more than art) by Vik Muniz on the people how pick through trash at one of the world's largest landfills to collect recyclables that can be sold. Here's a synopsis from the website:

"Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage..."

Vik's intentions are clear - he wants to change people's lives with the objects they are surrounded with on a daily basis. There is no better group of people to work with than those that work at a landfill. As I've mentioned previously (here, here and here), trash is visceral and tangible, so much so that we don't want to be around it, although some people are around it continuously. Some people are around it so much so that they are desensitised to it, just like people that work at one of the world's largest landfills, where objects and discards of humanity flow in like an unabated wave. Vik initially went into the project thinking it was just going to be just that, an art project - as a photographer, he was going to make multimedia photographs of the workers, with recyclables in the trash defining the human features of his subjects. He formed connections with some of the workers there (extremely thoughtful people), and had them work on their own photographs. Please click here and go to "Pictures of Garbage (2009)" to see their incredible work.

What ended up happening changed both Vik and the workers:

"However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) has great access to the entire process and, in the end, offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit." 

I am not going to talk much about the movie, because you should really just watch it (and you can read about it here), but what Vik essentially did was raising into consciousness, at a level higher than visibility, the objects and problems that surround us. This is indeed what the message of this blog so far has been: raise into consciousness and awareness the knowledge and problems that our world is facing, and think about how this problem is just another manifestation of deeper issues - disrespect for Earth and disrespect for people, present and future.