Art and politics, aesthetics and ethics in the documentary Waste Land

In this article we will discuss how is it possible to identify the political potential present in Waste Land, using the approach of Ranciere concerning the political subjetivation process and the of creation scenes of dissensus. We believe that the social and aesthetic project of the artist is only capable to promote concrete transformations in the life of the garbage collectors if we do not look its ethical imediaticity, that is, the direct identification between the forms of art and the forms of the politics, but if we search the way as art can unveil potentials, reconfigure regimes of visibility and question discursive orders that silence the garbage collectors. We conclude that the politics that may properly appear in Waste Land do not drift of the intentions of Vik Muniz, but appear in the way as the artistic process confers, in the tension between resistance and domination, knowledge capable to unfold imaginaries, to redefine languages and to invent new ways of action and presence in the world.