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Trashy Music: Landfill Harmonic Launches Film About 'Recycled Orchestra' on Kickstarter

Last fall, we wrote about an amazing town in Paraguay—built on and around a landfill—where local residents are literally making music from trash. There wasn’t much opportunity for young people in the area until a garbage picker had an unlikely inspiration: one day, after discovering the shell of an old violin in the trash, he decided to begin building an entire orchestra of instruments from recycled parts like oil cans and discarded wood. Now, the filmmakers who have been documenting the story of the "recycled orchestra" have put their film on Kickstarter.


Inspired by the life of Dan Eldon, a photojournalist and artist killed in Somalia in 1993, Creative Visions Foundation supports creative activists—people using film and other media to make change. The filmmakers explain why this project was something they had to work on:

The world generates about a billion tons of garbage a year. Those who live with it and from it are the poor—like the people of Cateura, Paraguay. And here they are transforming it into beauty. Landfill Harmonic follows the orchestra as it takes its inspiring spectacle of trash-into-music around the world.
Production began in 2010 when we traveled to Paraguay to film the children and the orchestra... Landfill Harmonic shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.
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Support Landfill Harmonic here.

This project will be featured in GOOD's Saturday series Push for Good—our guide to crowdfunding creative progress.

Image courtesy of Creative Visions Foundation.

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