Must watch! Arvind Gupta is a charming Mr. Wizard. And highly quotable:
“The slogan of the 70′s was Go to the People. Live with them. Start with what they know. Build on what they have.”
“The best thing you can do to a toy is break it.”
“Many of our folk toys have great science principles.”
Thanks, Douglas, for sending the link!
Attention trashies. Decorative Dumpster Day is just around the corner. This Sunday, May 1, Visible Trash, Olympia Dumpster Divers, everydaytrash.com and our colleagues in trash will take a day to post photos of and reflect upon the containers in which we store our waste. For reference, links to the first time we tried this can be found here and here.
This coming Sunday!
A friend sent me a link to this video today, but I don’t know which one because it arrived as a somewhat generic Vimeo link. Thanks, friend.
The artist’s website can be found here. Also, this reminds me that May 1st is Decorative Dumpster Day 2011.
#DDD2011
Save the date, it’s going to be good.
I have wanted to see Waste Land – Lucy Walker‘s documentary about Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and the huge trash portraits he created outside of Rio with help from local cartadores — for a while now. Somehow, I missed two or three chances to do so while the film screened in New York. Now, though, we all have another chance. Waste Land premiers on the PBS series Independent Lens on April 19th (check local listings). Or you can rent or stream it from Netflix here.
I got an advance review copy a while back and this past week had my friend Lisa over to watch it with me. Lisa is a sociologist who has lived for several years in India researching waste and water issues, which means she has spent a lot of time in dumps and with trash pickers (more on that to come in future posts).
I don’t want to belabor the review here. Short version: see this film. It made me cry. Twice. And I am not someone who cries easily.
The medium-length version: The storyline of Waste Land follows Muniz (via some slightly staged seeming Skype calls) setting up his project and getting others to help him execute his vision: to build large scale portraits of trash pickers using the trash they pick and getting those pickers to help him do it. Most of the film takes place outside of Rio at one of the world’s largest dump sites where you get to know an extremely compelling cast of characters who live and work there including a heartbreakingly young mother and the incredibly charismatic president of the cartadores association, which serves as a labor union and coop for the pickers.
Some interesting things I learned:
As an aside, during post-viewing Googleing, I found this story and video on Brazilian picker associations collecting used veggie oil.
Lucy Walker is also the filmmaker behind The Devil’s Playground, a fascinating look at Amish adolescence, which answered many of the burning questions I accumulated about the simple life during my teen years in Central PA. Definitely also worth seeing.
…is a really good show. Case in point, in a recent episode entitled “Garbage Island,” the character of Marshall gets obsessed with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Marshall
Hilarity ensues. Here’s a link to the episode.
Exciting news: Trash Mash-Up – the San Francisco-based organization that leads workshops on how to create art from trash — is coming to Brooklyn!
Trash Mash-Up
TMU, run by sisters Bridget and Jessica McCracken, will be in town working with Women in Need, a local nonprofit that provides housing, skills training and other resources to homeless women and their families. Stay tuned for updates. You can follow both groups on Facebook here and here.
This is one of my favorite reuses of plastic bags ever: bike wheel framed rocking chairs from Mali!
Mousso Koroba chairs
Get the skinny over at inhabitat or KIX.
via Timbuktu Chronicles. Thanks for sharing via Google reader, Jen!
Attn: Ruby Re-Usable and Little Shiva. Looks like there are some folks in the UK we need to recruit to participate Decorative Dumpster Day 2011. I found this link, then Googled “pimp my bin” and discovered a wealth of hits like the YouTube video below. Amazing.
via Metro.co.uk
Nathan Kensigner, featured here before for his documentation of infrequently frequented industrial corners of New York City, turns his lens on Newtown Creek in photos posted on his blog today.
Nathan Kensinger Photography
I’ve been traveling a lot lately for work and watching a lot of forgotten movies of the 1990′s on African cable. I can’t remember where or what film or TV show, but sometime in the last couple of weeks I saw a clip of the Newtown creek digester eggs as part of a scifi plot that used the images to portray some sort of alien energy production or a spaceship or something. It reminded me of the tour of the creek I got this past November from photographer Anthony Hamboussi.
Are you a fan of everydaytrash.com on Facebook? Check out our ever expanding album, Global Trash, made up of photos from Leila’s travels plus some amazing shots contributed by friends around the world.
Taj Mahal, Agra, India
Mark your calendars, trashies. Decorative Dumpster Day 2011 will take place on May 1st across the garblogosphere.
#DDD2011
In case you forgot, DDD is the biennial holiday during which we take a moment to think about where we are depositing our waste by posting photos on blogs of decorated trash receptacles. Here are some links to the inaugural event. Logo by Little Shiva of the Visible Trash Society who, along with Ruby Re-Usable of Olympia Dumpster Divers and everydaytrash.com co-founded this special day. Pass it on and start taking photos.
Haitian trash sculpture
Follow this link. Follow this link. Incredible trash art from sculptures in Haiti. Click on each artist’s name to view the work. And/or check out this badass documentary.
Thanks for the tip, Charles!
Does it count as idea theft if the rip off is for an environmental PSA? This interesting post by Michael Tully for Hammer to Nail asks this very question. Case in point: Rahmin Bahrani‘s Plastic Bag as jacked by The Magestic Plastic Bag, A Mocumentary. The original is narrated by Werner Herzog, the knock off by Jeremy Irons. No contest. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this particular imitation has been selected to play at Sundance.
You may remember photographer Nathan Kensinger from past mention on this blog of his coverage of Fresh Kills and the Hamilton Avenue marine transfer station. Nathan’s latest project is a three-part series examining the section of the Rockaways (a beachfront neighborhood in Queens) that once housed the Edgemere, America’s longest-running landfill, and remains home to its toxic legacy.
The Edgemere Landfill, photo by Nathan Kensinger
The New York Times book review’s 2010 pick for best illustrated children’s book is Here Comes the Garbage Barge! by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Red Nose Studio and published by Schwartz & Wade Books.
Here Comes the Garbage Barge!
The Times’ 2010 holiday gift guide slide show text efficiently sums the book up as “The story of a barge carrying 3,168 tons of garbage that couldn’t find a home — and how its ill-fated journey helped usher in the recycling era.” Can’t wait to read it. Here’s a link to the longer review with more on that true story, which we’ve mentioned here before.
via the ever-fabulous Ruby Re-Usable
