Reclaimed

This past Sunday I referred to an artist named Vik Muniz, and his 2008 work with professional trash scavengers (or catadores) at Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho.  At the time, Jardim Gramacho was the highest-volume landfill in the world, and was home to 13,000 people who scraped out a living salvaging recyclables.  Muniz went to Jardim Gramacho looking to meet these catadores and incorporate their stories into some kind of art installation.  His project is chronicled in the 2010 documentary Waste Land (it’s available through Netflix, and probably your local library and video store.  Watch it.  Seriously.).  At the beginning of the film, Muniz says, “What I do with my art is take people away from where they are and show them a different world; then give them a chance to look back at where they are differently.”  Muniz proceeds to explore a corner of the world that is home not only to the detritus of an enormous city but also to a community of discarded people.  Muniz asks these people their names.  He befriends them.  And he starts taking their pictures.  He goes on to stage photos modeled after famous masterpieces, with a group of catadores as his subjects.

After the photos have been taken, Muniz invites the subjects to join him at a warehouse, where he projects their photos onto the floor.  They bring in barrels full of materials they have scavenged from the landfill.  And they use the materials to outline and fill in their projected images.  The end results are warehouse-sized masterpieces rendered in trash.

And for the first time in their lives, the subjects of these masterpieces – the professional trashpickers – see themselves not as rejects but as objects of beauty. Muniz goes on to do much more with the images they’ve rendered, and opens frontiers for his subjects they wouldn’t have dreamed possible. 

What Muniz does at Jardim Gramacho is what God offers to do with each of us.  In 1 Peter 2:4-10, the Apostle talks about us as “living stones” – discarded building materials that become a masterpiece in the hands of the Creator.  At the end of the film, one of Muniz’s subjects says, “When I became a trash picker, I was so ashamed.  But then I met Vik.  And I became part of his art.  Now I’m not ashamed anymore.”  God seeks out those of us who are imperfect.  Or incomplete.  Who may have been marginalized or rejected.  And invites us to become part of his life-changing project of reclamation and redemption.