Trash Land

Documentary Project(Photography and Post-productions) By: José Ferreira
Text Related By José Ferreira, Written By: Nuno Silva
Translation By: Mariana Luz and Catarina Mendonça

The grotesque conscious / unconscious inertia of people as human beings takes us to nasty scenarios that characterize any underdeveloped world, from nothing less than astronomical distances.
Such distances, makes the twenty-first century scenarios, as I testified in the Huléne dump. Animations awfully pictorial to an outdated outlook.. Scenarios where life is exiled of senses, where I question the color of my faith and alienate from the reality ... a reality as strong as this.
In southern Mozambique, in the heart of Maputo and just a few meters from the airport of the capital, is the dump of Huléne. Mother of many stories, home of many renegades and maintenance of many more. It?s hard to achieve any kind of judgment, when incredulity upheaves any soul or intellectual perception.The limits of the trash, a cut south for a makeshift entrance, a massive hole in the wall of cement, concrete and rough, exceed even the common sensitivity - and even the perspicuity of the look - and not even the walls that imprison her, can hide such nasty scenario.
There converge all sorts of needs and purposes. Constant movement of trucks and people make up a complex interplay of colors and sensations that awaken us to the doorstep of the poor and insensitive. There are many characters, but very few differences.
The "garbage collectors" are the ones who shake their horizons. They are the pawns of a few businesses, and perhaps more profitable, they can still flourish among the deepest and most desperate filthiness - recycling. Desperate, they try to frantically stick the roads of garbage in search of some utility. Because that utility there, and to them, can later be worth a little more bread and milk.
Then, the others, which resemble too many caricatures of the poor and homeless, who are often camouflaged between common jokes and cartoons from the civilized world. The others, of the empty eyes. The others, with the shapeless smile and empty faced. The others, that make this experience more human.
The pictures flow in a disproportionate rhythm. The uneasy conscience of what I see, drastically changes my perception of things. Nothing has ever made such sense, and the material value, so few.
There, the beautiful becomes another beautiful, and the dignified another worthy.
There, the value of things never was on the color of the shirt or even in the shoe size. In the midst of so little, and surrounded by such heartbreaking putrefaction, easy guarantees such as we have like ?we eat meat everyday?, never became so disturbing. The anxiety has long taken me by complete, but the surprise, that?s untimely and wakes me at all moments. There, when the fruit becomes the rest, and the rest becomes the fruit. It is not easy to know the trash. It is not easy to believe in what is real. Knowing it is nothing more than waking up to the different realities of man, and the world. And the biggest mistake is to thing that there?s no space to shame. A more touching shame in its real sense. Because for many people there it?s not and never was an option to be there. And many have also seen behind the walls.
These circumstances, in a country that?s developing through foreign investment, makes the Huléne trash an increasingly outdated phenomenon, even for the context of economic crisis in which Mozambique is associated.
This is not the color of my faith, this is the sad truth that stubbornly disfigures civil society and the condition of man.