Wasteland

I enjoyed Wasteland. It was nice to see what art can do to really change people's lives. I thought the movie touched on a few key points that play a large role in practicing social work: starting local but keeping in mind global impact, personal involvement from the social worker/facilitator, and ownership by participation of clients.

Thinking Local
I think for social workers this is an important concept because to be successful on a larger scale, one must first start local and cater to the different nuances of different communities and then hope to influence on a greater scale later on. Latin American scholar Gustavo Esteva and Indian scholar Madh Suri Prakash claim that even in the present era of globalization, "'global thinking' is at its best only an illusion, and at its worst, the grounds for the kinds of destructive and dangerous actions perpetrated by global 'think tanks'" (22). The best example they give of a grassroots movement that has been successful on a local level but has greater implications is Community Supported Agriculture. Community Supported Agriculture teaches urban people how to support local farmers. By supporting this movement, pepole invest in their own economy and community and also help to take down that big  agribusiness corporations, who exploit farmers. In Wasteland, it was good to see how the artist's vision never got ahead of itself and that he embraced the particular community around him, witnessed by using the trash in the pieces of art. The artist not only raised awareness of the tough living and working conditions of these workers but also helped empower them on a local scale (having some of the earnings going towards helping the trash-workers union). The raising awareness aspect of the project never outweighed the artist's commitment to the people he employed.

Personal Involvement
One of the more interesting parts of the movie was when the artists wife debated with him if he should take Tiao to London for the auction. Ultimately her thinking was wrong when she thought that taking Tiao out of his environment would make him bitter upon return because he saw a greater way of life in London, but she did bring up the idea of how much personal involvement is too much? For social workers, it is important to set boundaries between a personal and professional life. In community projects, I think the boundaries can be more flexible because the social worker's commitment to the project automatically makes them have a stake in the outcome like everyone else. But what is too much personal involvement? If a social worker was facilitating the art project in Wasteland, would a professional boundary be crossed if he or she took Tiao to London? Because it was the artist taking facilitating the project, I think he had different professional boundaries and it was the right decision to make by bringing Tiao with him to London. If it was a social worker though, I am not so sure what to think.

Ownership
The most important aspect of the project, and the reason why it was so successful was the artist letting his subjects take ownership in the project. A community project can only work if the community is involved. As I mentioned before, the artists commitment to the people and the community outweighed any other motives he had in the project, which helped facilitate the empowerment of his subjects. By investing in them and including them in the project, the subjects ultimately saw that they could in fact, "free themselves in the same voluntary ways they entered [working for the trash companies]" (25). Valuing a person's independence and self-determination is a key part of social work practice, and by letting them take ownership in the project and not letting the project become anything other than what it was supposed to be, the artist did well to help these people and help the community around them.

Esteva, G & Prakash M.S. (1998). Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. New York, New York: Zed Books.