Reframing Trash Into Art Favorite 

In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently. A garbage dump like Gramacho is a good place to observe how things that were once useful or meaningful can descend into a material purgatory, where everything is mixed back into a primeval mess.

In Gramacho, nothing is complete; only fragments of things stubbornly holding on to some residual property or identity remain. Amid the decay, there is also a sense of entropy. Here in the refuse heap, discarded designs and once-popular labels from our excessively commercialized world blend together. This is the ultimate effect of our economic growth that could only be financed by the atomization of desire.

If we were to slice into the roughly 150-foot mountain of rubbish, like cutting a piece of cake, we would find an entire archaeology of material yearnings. We would see 8-track tapes, broken BMX bike frames, VCRs, leaky water beds and video game consoles — everything that was once responsible for making someone temporarily complete. In a place like Gramacho, it’s impossible not to associate waste with desire.

Here, I met people who lived immersed in such broken dreams; people sorting through the trash, attempting to rescue the material value of objects; people separating and recycling that chaotic rubble, simplifying it back to its elemental past only for it to be transformed into another desirable thing. Working with these individuals gave me a new awareness of the importance of the artwork within a universal system of objects. Being stuck in an endless cycle like Sisyphus, the king from Greek mythology who was condemned to roll a rock up a hill forever, can make an artist want to stop transforming ideas into objects.

The Industrial Revolution ended the romanticized image of the heroic artist. This revolution filled the world with objects that trivialized their own production and, consequently, their meaning. When machines and specialized assembly-line workers started effectively making things in series, artists were forced to shift their focus from the objects to the processes of their making. While working as an artist still means I’m adding stuff to the infinite inventory of parts that we use to build our collective stories, for me, interesting art always has to do with how things are created.

Art’s rarity nostalgically harks back to a time before mass production. Its value is often as abstract as its nature. Artworks are tools we can use to challenge our often-anesthetized connection to the past, as well as to help us frame our view of the present.

In 2018, a decade after my first visit to Gramacho, a tragic event indelibly marked how I think about the significance of making things. The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro was destroyed by a fire that burned most of its 20-million-plus item collection. Some of the most significant items damaged included Luzia, one of the oldest humanoid skulls found in South America; the beautiful sarcophagi of the Egyptian priestess Sha-Amun-en-su from the eighth century B.C.; and one of the world’s largest and most respected entomology collections.

The fact that the museum was lost and I could no longer visit its treasures seemed so hard to fathom that I had to see the site as soon as I was allowed. With my own eyes, I needed to view how thousands of years of history turned into dark ashes. All that was left was matter, free from meaning, history, value and humanity.

When I rummaged through the remains of the burned museum, I thought about my experience at the Gramacho garbage dump. What could worthless, discarded things that will take millenniums to decompose possibly have in common with ancient treasures that were pulverized in a matter of hours? Seeing the museum’s ashes showed me how two seemingly opposite things could end up so alike.

In 2023, natural history museums from 28 countries teamed up to create a comprehensive digital inventory of their items. The project resulted in a global database of 1.1 billion objects. When items are digitized, natural disasters or wartime conflicts that destroy museums won’t result in a complete dearth of collections. The objects will live on, just in some other form.

As our inventory of digital objects expands, what does this mean for physical objects? What legacy will museums of the future hold? There are now museums without permanent collections or even without physical sites. These museums, which focus on audiovisual presentations, virtual experiences, interactive video mapping and artificial intelligence curation, could point to a future that is not concerned with revering the material evidence of our past. If so, Gramacho will be the museum of that future. Some people will still be rummaging the garbage heaps of history, but they will be looking for meaning that can’t be recycled.

What we leave behind will mark our brief presence in history. If we care about how these items will reflect upon us, we will consider each purchase we make and each object we produce. Desire is what got us here in the first place; this desire is part of our human nature.

I use art to examine this place of desire. My art allows me to explore the narrow gap between wanting and doing, mind and matter, consciousness and phenomena. I built my actual workspace at the time, in Gramacho, a place capable of producing things that interact with the world in ways that continue to surprise me. In my “Pictures of Garbage” series, I recycled the garbage from Gramacho into portraits of the people who lived and worked there. Some of these portraits drew on famous images from the art history canon. I used the sale of these pictures to help finance a better life for the recycling workers.

Additionally, from the ashes of the burned treasures from Brazil’s National Museum, I created my “Museum of Ashes” series: pictures of what the objects looked like before they were destroyed. I channeled my sadness over the fire’s destruction into creativity. I worked directly with archaeologists from the museum’s rescue team to pinpoint the location of the original objects, and I formed my images from those exact ashes. Proceeds from the series helped pay for the rescue efforts of the little that was left from the fire.

Both series are about the dream and the reality of continuity, and about recycling material and meaning as an artistic and social practice. With my art, I’m not stuck in Sisyphean redundancy. I have the freedom of transformation like Proteus, the prophet from Greek mythology who could shape shift. In art, the meaning and value of objects can be flipped, or even shifted from the physical world to the digital. Garbage and ashes may transcend into a work more complex than its source material suggests, and there is always new meaning to discover.