What does living together look like in cities with deep social and spatial inequalities?

If the categories of human and animal are mutually constituted, what does this story tell about the human and the animal in the scene? Where does humanity ends and animality begins?

On Monday, the 10th, I interviewed C. Gari, an ex waste worker. We spent the morning at Circulo Laranja, an association he founded in 2015 with his wife to continue his political battle against the precarity of waste workers.

In this interview, as in the ones that followed since then, talking about rats has been a proxy to understand deeper the politics of inequalities in Rio.

Throughout the interview, C. explained to me how rats’ lives enmesh with the lives of waste, and how the lives of waste are intrinsically enmeshed with the contentious politics of city management. And how these, in turn, are enmeshed with corruption, unequal distribution of resources, and the new patterns of modern slavery. Relational ontologies.

After visiting him at the Circulo, we walked around the area.

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This video was taken at the junction between the Jacarezinho and Pica-Pau communities in Rio's Zona Norte. When we arrived, a man and a woman were sifting through the waste at the dump, while a family of pigs was scrutinising the waste along the road. Hesitantly, the largest pig approached the dump and started to eat from the waste. The two people continued their activity, carefully avoiding close contact with the pig, not making eye contact; trying to be discreet.

Meanwhile, a man arrived on the scene. He took out his phone and started documenting. C. asked me to do the same, requesting that I record him talking about the scene and then zoom in on the trash, the pigs, the river, and the community on the left. At that point, the two people left the dump / too many cameras around. /Infrastructural incursion/. As they departed, the entire pig family arrived, arguing and stealing each other's findings, making the distinctive sound of angry pigs.

It wasn’t just the pig family there. Pigeons and cockroaches were also present, along with countless organisms we couldn't see with the naked eye. Rats seemed to have been there, too, evidenced by the holes in the ground, though they didn’t appear during my observation.

In someone's eyes, it might have seemed like a perfect scene of urban commensality, with all the species coming together to eat at the dump. But commensality suggests a certain poetics of being together. Is it fair? At the dump, living together looked more like a curse for the species involved. Each species traced its own path, carefully avoiding close encounters with others.

To me, the dump is an allegory. It epitomises the city of conflict, power, and negotiation, where survival dictates behaviour and harmony is a distant ideal.