Vik Muniz

São Paulo, Brazil, 1961 

            The artist Vik Muniz is a researcher of the transformative effects that artistic practices have on people. The intention of his work is to show another possible world, to take the viewer, at least for a short period of time, out of where they are. In this search that combines art and social projects, the materials he works with are diverse: dust, food, diamonds, and any object he finds along the way and then photographs. For Muniz, photography is pure optical illusion, so he does not seek to find spectacular moments to portray, but he builds scenes based on what the environment offers him. 

            In productions such as Imágenes de Basura, Muniz exhibits a series of portraits of the workers in one of the largest garbage dumps in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked together with the garbage collectors and for which he absolutely used garbage. In addition to portraying the people with whom he shares his creative processes, in other pieces he recreates iconic images, such as Van Gogh's bed made with gelatin or a painting by, the American artist, Donal Judd, drawn with dust. The leap in his career came with a series of portraits he made of the children of Brazilian sugar plantation workers. He decided to reproduce the photos he took with sugar, an element that simultaneously alluded to the transformative role that sugar played in their lives, the sweetness of the children and the silver nitrate crystals, characteristic of photographic film.

            Throughout his life, marked by resilience, it was always clear to Muniz that, in order to succeed in whatever field he wanted to pursue, he had to be trained and study hard. In his youth, he put emphasis on learning English and studied advertising and later photography. The trait that runs through his life and his artistic production is field research; Muniz delves into what interests him to unravel its idiosyncrasies, hidden sides, sensibility, and unsung heroes or villains. This artist sets out to narrate the unofficial stories, the sacrificed lives behind the cold news, or the production systems in which we are immersed, as in the case of Imágenes de Basura or Los Niños de Azúcar. The creativity to manipulate unconventional objects and bring them to the scene in metaphorical form is only the first visual impression of an artist who insists and firmly believes in art and its power to transform life.