S T E W A R D NEWS
Making Music Out of Trash
The world-renowned
Recycled Orchestra
of Cateura came to
Steward in November
as the first in this
year’s Bryan
Innovation Lab
Visiting Innovator
series.
“I am here because of music,” Recycled Orchestra of
Cateura director Favio Chávez said onstage in Steward’s
Robins Theatre. “I have learned so much more from
music than anything else in my life. Most of all, I’ve
learned that our Orchestra has the ability to inspire
people.”
On November 14, 2018, Mr. Chávez and eight other
members of the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura (some
as young as 13) traveled from Paraguay to Richmond to
bring their music and message to Steward as a part of
this year’s Bryan Innovation Lab (BIL) Visiting Innovators
series. Steward’s World Languages department
approached Director of the BIL Cary Jamieson last year
with the idea to invite the Orchestra to Steward, and
Ms. Jamieson and the rest of the BIL faculty took to it
immediately.
“We loved this idea because the Orchestra’s story
overlapped with so many of our values and strengths
here at Steward:” Ms. Jamieson said. “Our commitment
to sustainability, our incredible Music and Fine Arts
departments, our passion for making, and the idea of
‘inspiration,’ our theme for the year. It truly spoke to the
idea of improving our world with what we have on hand.
To me, it’s one of the most innovative and inspirational
stories out there.”
The Recycled Orchestra was established in 2006 by
Mr. Chávez, an environmental engineer and music
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enthusiast as a means to keep kids from playing in the
nearby landfill. Twenty-year-old Ada Rios was among
the members of the Orchestra who visited Steward,
and her story is one of those featured in the award-
winning 2016 documentary about the Orchestra,
Landfill Harmonic. Also among the Innovators that day
was co-director of the film Juliana Penaranda-Loftus,
who shared her story and served as a translator for Mr.
Chávez.
Cateura, Paraguay, where the Orchestra members
grew up, is the site of a gigantic landfill. Because of
this, most of the families who live there make their
living by collecting trash and selling it. The landfill is
what first brought Mr. Chávez to Cateura. “I came as
an environmental engineer,” Mr. Chávez said. “I worked
with people in the community on different issues
around the environment and what they could do to
alleviate the situation.”
A lifelong music lover, Mr. Chávez began giving free
music lessons to some of the local children of Cateura
early on in his time there. It was in his search for
a solution to the problem of inaccessibility to real
instruments that he came up with the idea of using the
landfill to make music. “I saw that the people in the
community had the talent to use [this trash] to make
instruments,” Mr. Chávez said.
So the Recycled Orchestra was born, and their story