In the 2010 documentary film Waste Land , directed by Lucy Walker and co-directed by João Jardim and Karen Harley, Brazilian-born and Brooklyn-based visual artist Vik Muniz travels to the Jardim Gramacho landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, he creates works of art out of material from the landfill with the help of several catadores , or pickers, who work there. Though Muniz’s visual artwork and Walker’s film both form an aesthetic of garbage by making trash the material most central to their work, their redemptive impulses should be questioned, and their use of garbage aesthetics analyzed. Their work simultaneously takes part in and falls short of the political goals of this aesthetic, namely, to focus both visual and political attention on the inequalities faced by marginalized people, places, and materials. In reading Waste Land for the ways in which it both embraces and shirks garbage aesthetics, I will suggest how this aesthetic approach can help interrogate the limitations and possibilities offered by the theorizations of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene they intersect with, calling attention to their political and aesthetic qualities.

The aim of this article is to examine how different modes of moving image practice can expose and critique the impacts of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism on Indigenous communities in northern Canada. The article focuses on the work of two contemporary artist-filmmakers, Thirza Cuthand and Thomas Kneubühler. Their work has consistently engaged with the impacts of late capitalist violence and power within the context of settler-colonial Canada. The article argues that these filmmakers’ engagements and critiques of such formations of power are built around radically different framings and conceptualizations of futurity—as both a dominant logic within the exploitative rationale of extractive capitalist speculation and projection (Kneubühler), but also as a potential catalyst for Indigenous decolonization and self-determination (Cuthand).