MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, October 31, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
Suggested donation: $10 (free with MoMA ticket within thirty days of MoMA visit)
718-784-2084
www.ps1.org
MoMA PS1’s two-day event, MOVE!, continues its melding of art and fashion today, featuring unique collaborations between such inspired pairings as Kalup Linzy and Diane Von Furstenberg, Olaf Breuning and Cynthia Rowley, Rashaad Newsome and Alexander Wang, Dan Colen and Proenza Schouler, David Blaine and Adam Kimmel, Ryan McNamara and Robert Geller, Terence Koh and Italo Zucchelli, and others. Part of MoMA PS1’s Free Space program, the special afternoon should be a great way to spend Halloween.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, but based in New York City for many years, Vik Muniz has been making portraits and re-creating artistic masterpieces using such materials as sand, sugar, jewels, junk, paper, and pigments and showing them in galleries and museums around the globe. In 2007, he returned to Brazil and met with the catadores, men and women who work at Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in the world, picking out recyclable materials they can then sell to survive. He comes to know Tiaõ and Zumbi, who help run the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, as well as such other catadores as Suelem, Isis, Irma, Magna, and Valter, each a character in his or her own right, with unique stories to tell. Filmmaker Lucy Walker (BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) documents Muniz’s interaction with these dirt-poor people, who live in Rio’s dangerous favelas, as he sets out to capture their images by using the garbage they sift through to eke out some kind of living. Despite their surroundings, they are proud and happy, welcoming in Muniz, who is not shy about calling himself the most successful Brazilian artist in the world and sharing his determination to give something back. WASTE LAND is about art and ecology, about class consciousness and the vast separation between the rich and the poor. The film proceeds in a fairly standard, straightforward manner, putting Muniz and the project on too high a pedestal, which is not surprising given that the initial idea was Walker’s; the heartwarming subject matter, more than the filmmaking itself, is the reason it has been a hit at international festivals, including winning Audience Awards at Sundance and Berlin earlier this year. Walker, Muniz, and Brazilian counselor Pedro Terra will be on hand at several shows on Friday and Saturday to introduce the film and/or participate in a postscreening Q&A.
