Inaugurating this space for the discussion (or soliloquy, depending on how this blog strikes your interest) I will begin by talking about this tomato.
I wanted to begin with this image because it is familiar, and it is a commodity as simple as they come; however, regardless of its simplicity, every commodity hides a wealth of intricate significations and interrelations. This tomato is part of nature, it is part of the economy, it could be part of your body, and it will end up being waste. Nature, well, because it grows and exists outside of the human body and consciousness; the economy, because it participates in the process of production, distribution, and sales that works the wheels of the food-production industry in a capitalist system; your body, since if you were to buy this tomato and turn it into, say, a caprese salad, it would be integrated to your organism in the form of nutrients; and waste, well, because whether or not you or any one consumes it, its materiality will decompose and be discarded as an unwanted remainder.
In Ilha das Flores (1989), Brazilian filmmaker Jorge Furtado wittily explains in 13 min. the social, economic, and ethical implications of the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of one tomato. This little film is humorous, almost to the point of successfully erasing the ominous tone of its opening titles “There is a place called Ilha das Flores/ There is no god,” but its dark mark remains as an aftertaste or the lingering smell of the trashcan in your kitchen.
Clearly, Furtado is not talking only about a tomato any more. He manages to explain the history of money, the functioning of the capitalist extraction of profit, and the existence of Ilha das Flores with all its appalling poverty; all this in just 13 dizzying minutes. The superposition of the narration and the montage of images is very effective in provoking the irony that hammers away the point that we as humans have a questionably record of accomplishments: the atomic bomb, the holocaust, and places like Ilha das Flores—highly developed brains and opposing thumbs notwithstanding—.
It is remarkable how landfills like Ilha das Flores, which exist in every corner of the world, have a certain shared aesthetics when photographed of filmed (both of which media erase the smell factor). They are places of accumulation of dissimilar objects that end up together by chance, and nevertheless, the visual compositions they form can be turned into meaningful striking images. For me, the genius of the montage edited by Furtado is precisely that it formally resembles a landfill of images of different origin, shown together to elicit an understanding of the very complex life of capitalist economy.
Garbage is fundamentally relational; we all come in contact with it in a meaningful way, be it as producers, consumers, collectors, or scavengers. Garbage is ubiquitous; it is in our lives, in our cities, in our kitchens and its image is also in museums, books, and films. With this entry I want to open a space to consider the great wealth of knowledge we can scavenge from trash.
Image Remains 
