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Pieter Van Hees's Waste Land (2014) situates Belgian national anxiety in the country's White supremacist past and present, both of which milieux are shared by its language communities. The film suggests, perhaps in spite of itself, that the claim by Brussels to be a centre of power is ethnically, as well as ethically, problematic. It breaks a taboo in confronting Belgium's colonial past, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Leopold II's accession (1865). Yet, it ultimately reproduces the economy of the racialized system it tries to critique, becoming particularly problematic from the point of view of Black women. The ineffability of spatial spectacle would betray the way in which its protagonist's narrative is 'mapped' onto the space of Brussels, with the character's breakdown – hence, a failed attempt at constructing his own narrative, at mapping his life in Brussels – bearing further unintentional testimony to the city's abject history beneath it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2010 documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker and co-directed by João Jardim and Karen Harley, Brazilian-born and Brooklyn-based visual artist Vik Muniz travels to the Jardim Gramacho landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, he creates works of art out of material from the landfill with the help of several catadores, or pickers, who work there. Though Muniz's visual artwork and Walker's film both form an aesthetic of garbage by making trash the material most central to their work, their redemptive impulses should be questioned, and their use of garbage aesthetics analyzed. Their work simultaneously takes part in and falls short of the political goals of this aesthetic, namely, to focus both visual and political attention on the inequalities faced by marginalized people, places, and materials. In reading Waste Land for the ways in which it both embraces and shirks garbage aesthetics, I will suggest how this aesthetic approach can help interrogate the limitations and possibilities offered by the theorizations of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene they intersect with, calling attention to their political and aesthetic qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper revolves around the links that unite the motif of the Waste Land with the wound of the Fisher King in the Conte du Graal. These links are based, on the one hand, on ancestral beliefs that connect the land's fecundity with the goodness of the king, while his faults are punished with its sterility, and on the other, with Augustinism. The ills of the Grail's family constitute a deserved castigation derived from a chain of sins, originating in the previous generation with the commission of a sin of origin. The punishment embraces all the members of the family, and, in the very same way that Original sin is the cause of both mortality and the earth's aridity, its punishment presupposes the king's impotence and the kingdom's barrenness, Perceval's matricide, and his silence in front of the Grail. The awaited irruption of Perceval in the Fisher King's domain signified for the Grail's family the same as that of redemption for mankind. Perceval thus redeems his lineage, and with it, the earth, in the line of the old belief that linked the king's sins with the earth's sterility, in conformity with the pattern of the Fall, Punishment and Redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]