Forest Ruins: The Guarani Who Survive Beneath São Paulo

In São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city, the forest did not disappear — it was simply covered by concrete. There, amid highways, high-rises, and the cosmopolitan sprawl of 21 million inhabitants, Guarani villages endure, preserving language, spirituality, and territory. The city grew over them without seeing them, and that invisibility — more than physical distance — is the true ruin Rafael Vilela set out to document in powerful images of resilience.

He was 31 when he discovered that Indigenous peoples were still living in the city where he was born. “It took me 31 years to realize that the Guarani are still here in the city,” he admits. The revelation was not only historical; it was personal. How is it possible to grow up in a metropolis and remain unaware of the land that sustains it?

Vilela was born in 1989 in São Paulo. The son of progressive, politically active parents, he grew up surrounded by social debate. Yet it was shyness that ultimately shaped his gaze. At 16, he found in the camera a way to break his silence. “Photography allowed me to overcome my shyness and go where I otherwise couldn’t,” he says. He calls it a “guilt-free excuse” — permission to enter, to listen, to observe.

At home there were books by Sebastião Salgado. Those images, he recalls, taught him that the world was not harmonious — that it held contradiction, pain, inequality. He understood that his middle-class reality was not the whole world.

He studied graphic design to support himself, aware that the kind of photography he wanted to pursue had no commercial market. “I knew there was no commercial interest in the photography I wanted to make,” he says. Design gave him structure, management skills, and autonomy at a time when newsrooms were beginning to collapse.

He co-founded Media Ninja, a collective that transformed independent media coverage in Brazil during the 2010s — a decade of activism, street presence, and close engagement with social movements. But in 2019, he made a decision that would redefine his path: to return to the field, to the territory, to direct listening. “To place my body back at the service of reality,” he explains.

In 2020, a concrete threat accelerated that return. The Guarani community faced the possible loss of part of its territory without prior consultation. Vilela went to document the occupation and ended up camping there for weeks. What began as coverage has become a six-year relationship.

“Now it’s been six years documenting this, and I’m still learning… I’m still arriving.” Photography ceased to be the center; relationship, trust, and time became the true work.

The project was presented by POY LATAM as Forest Ruins, though the original concept comes from Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak: “Forest Ruins.” It refers not only to felled trees but to a deeper devastation that began with European invasion — the rupture of knowledge systems, spiritualities, agricultural practices, and ways of living in balance with nature.

“It is the destruction of a way of life that existed in equilibrium with nature,” he says.

In the Guarani villages, that balance is not a metaphor. Barefoot children walk on red earth where mud is not perceived as dirt. “There is no distinction between humanity and land… it is all one single thing,” he says. That lived reality challenges the urban model that believes it governs nature.

“The idea of controlling nature… is a great lie,” he says, linking that illusion to “a civilizational crisis… that generates a climate crisis.”

Over time, Vilela understood that the project was not documenting only this ethnic group. “I thought I was documenting the history of the Guarani… and then I began to understand that I was documenting the white ignorance within myself.” The camera ceased to be an instrument to explain the other and became a tool to dismantle his own blindness.

An archaeologist once told him that what he was doing was “archaeology of the present.” In the Atlantic Forest, where organic matter quickly decomposes, oral memory preserves what the soil does not retain. To document the present is to safeguard the past. The Guarani language remains alive; children learn it before Portuguese. Five centuries after contact, the culture not only endures — it expands.

Vilela firmly rejects the narrative of extinction. “The work I’m doing is about life; it’s about the strength and vitality of the Guarani.” Today he sees progress: territorial recognition underway, greater Indigenous political visibility, and a shift in social perception. “It is an achievement of the Guarani struggle… I am just one more ally.”

Twenty minutes from his home in western São Paulo, he can step into a prayer house where almost only Guarani is spoken. That proximity is not accidental; it is a choice. His daughter is growing up in the same city that holds this living memory. Documenting this territory is not merely a professional project; it is a way of leaving her a legacy and teaching her that history does not begin with concrete.

From this experience, he now looks toward recently contacted peoples in the Amazon, convinced they hold keys to confronting the contemporary crisis. If there is one lesson he has learned from the Guarani, it is that the future is not built by dominating the land, but by recognizing oneself as part of it.

Forest ruins are not merely vestiges of the past; they are open wounds and, at the same time, seeds of continuity. For in the heart of the megalopolis, the forest still breathes — and with it, a memory that does not ask permission to exist.