Maryland Hall Presents: Landfill Harmonic and Recycled Orchestra of Cateura

Landfill Harmonic is a film that chronicles the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, a Paraguayan musical group that plays instruments made entirely from garbage pieces found in the landfill where their community is settled. Their story went viral and catapulted the orchestra into the global spotlight. Favio Chávez is an environmental engineer with a musical background who first started working in Cateura on a recycling and waste project program for eight years, where he noticed the needs of the children. He fell in love with the children and families in the community and decided to open a music school which gave rise to the creation of the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, where he now serves as teacher, mentor, and director. Many of the children in Cateura do not live with their parents and more than 40% of children don’t finish school because they have to work. To keep them out of trouble, Favio introduced them to music and taught them to create instruments with garbage found in the landfill. While parents began to see that this kept their children out of trouble, this led to reclaiming children that were once abandoned! Now, the rest is history, and Favio has taught music and the building of recycled instruments to over 200 children from the community. Goldstein-Cunitz and Maryland Hall Presents Film at the Hall will present a featured Landfill Harmonic screening and a special presentation of the Paraguayan orchestra, Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. In tandem with the featured film screening and live presentation, ‘Recycled Orchestra of Cateura’ will hold a brief residency at Maryland Hall, where our Outreach program will organize community events in collaboration with World Artists Experiences (WAE) and host visits to local schools.