Final Tiaõ photographic print entitled Marat/Sebastiao–Pictures of Garbage Photograph by Vik Muniz, courtesy of Vik Muniz Studio (Click for Slideshow)

Fox narrates: “I wanted to get out of Gasland, but there was nowhere to go.” Armed with the prestige of an Oscar nomination, he has recently journeyed to the halls of Congress as an anti-fracking lobbyist, but the escape continues to elude him.
Gasland is nominated for Best Documentary Feature alongside the similarly titled Waste Land, a film by Lucy Walker about an artist’s attempt to make something beautiful out of the debris in the world’s biggest landfill. The artist is Vik Muniz, who has gained a reputation for creating high-priced works out of unconventional materials.  Waste Land follows him as he returns to his native Brazil, where he puts a group of trash pickers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho to work assembling giant portraits of themselves made from discarded rubbish. And rubbish the finished assemblages certainly are not.
The most ebullient film of the bunch, “Waste Land” is full of emotion, as Muniz tries to convince the demoralized workers of their self-worth through the creation of art. It’s also a wake up call to the rest of us about the afterlife of what we throw away and a powerful lesson about the currency of materials.
Last fall, Muniz spoke to PLANET about finding value in unexpected places: “Garbage is something that we’re always trying to hide. We put it in black bags so we don’t have to see what’s inside. It’s the parts of your history that you don’t want in your family albums. In other words, it’s a very non-visual material, and for a visual artist to be working with it seemed like a good idea.”