森田良成

Yoshinari Morita

Ana Botol – in Indonesian “children of the (empty) bottle”. Holding a balloon with a squeaky toy inside, they walk around the town with their carts in the scorching sun, making their squeaking sound and collecting all kinds of waste – empty bottles, scrap iron and the like. I first met one of them in a town in West Timor, Indonesia. Having finished his work for the day, he headed to a small hut, surrounded on all sides by heaps of garbage piled up high, where he stayed with the other men who all came to this lowland town from a village high up in the mountains. Ana Botol all like to say: “We‘ve got everything we need in the village, except for just one thing – the money”. The garbage they collect is meticulously taken apart, sorted into heaps of the same material, and then sold – bringing them the money they so seek. And the money they have thus earned as an anonymous labor force in the lowest strata of the town society is then used in the various rites of passage held in the village, thus ending up being firmly embedded in concrete cycles of human relationships. Always going back and forth between the town and their village, always keeping a safe distance from the cold hands of the town economy, they are ever concerned with weaving the thread of the past and future of their close-knit family ties – back in their home village.