Landfill Meditation

Short-Film / 2015

Landfill Meditation reflects on the notion of progress and the waste that it leaves behind. This is about integrating the worst parts of ourselves and acknowledging the damage we do to the planet as a whole.

Landfill Meditation makes for uncomfortable viewing: rather than the usual postcard view of Cape Town or Johannesburg, we are forced to linger on unsettling imagery of the derelict spaces in which Faith places her broken cars, symbols of forgotten and discarded once cherished objects.

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Landfill Meditation is a short collaborative video by South African artist Faith47 and director Dane Dodds, inspired by her street paste series of broken down cars. Landfill Meditation doesn’t chronicle the creation of the murals but rather contextualizes them, linking Faith47’s abandoned cars to other objects and spaces once loved and desired, then later discarded. “We cannot separate ourselves clean and perfect from the trash we dump out back,” says the video’s voiceover, adapted from Native American author Gerald Vizenor’s short story collection, Landfill Meditation. “Being clean is a delusion.”