Laíze Lantyer Luz (ELP 2021) | CEO and Founder, PEACE & Navida, Brazil

The cover of the photo exhibit book "Luxury Pickers: (in)visible heroines."

I believe small actions can be the best way to invest in our planet, the real beginning of big transformations. The incursion into the daily life and work of others originated two audiovisual products − a photographic exhibition and a documentary − which translate, not the emancipatory ideal, but perhaps a principle of visibility and recognition. 

The photo exhibit book, “Luxury Pickers: (in) visible heroines” is a laconic representation of what I understand by environmental education in modern times –– one that reproduces the (in)visibility of the best environmental and human rights teachers and counselors that I could have had during the course of this research.

The photo exhibition is an important tool for environmental education. Without the recognition of the female, ethnic, racial, class and territorial nuances in their full diversity, it would be impossible to make any mention of Justice. Therefore, something also important to human rights, but without the dialectical spectrum of the non-recognition of subjects excluded from the system of production and consumption, of the social form in its fetishist orientation.

At the same time, as the precariousness of work and life in which waste pickers are seen as superfluous and dispensable feeds capitalism and maintains its inequalities, it shows how much the pickers are in a process of autophagy, being the generators of their own obsolescence in a waste-free society. 

The photo exhibition and script for the documentary "Luxury Pickers: (in)visible heroines" were the product of my master's thesis in Social Policy and Citizenship from UCSal, and part of the book Direito à Emancipação Sustentável ou obsolescência humana? As Catadoras de Luxo em uma Sociedade Lixo Zero, freely translated as "Right to sustainable emancipation or human obsolescence? The luxury pickers in a waste-free society."

I accepted the challenge to work on an interdisciplinary research project involving socio-environmental aspects based on the Social Sciences and Humanities - all under three pillars: education, citizenship, and human rights. Therefore, I intended to use the photographic exhibition and documentary as a framework for society’s environmental awareness and education through art.

I invite everyone to exercise the right to delirium in imagining an inclusive waste-free city. The intention is that the images and voices of these environmental agents can alert, sensitize, and educate environmental illiterates who live in luxury. May we know how to take advantage of the invitation to look into the internal garbage we carry around. It makes us sicker every day. What we lack is the ability to see the (in)visible and the other with the eyes of the soul.

To read more about the project:  https://navidaeditora.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/A5-E-book-Catadoras-de-Luxo.pdf