Notes on how to build a forest

Notes on How to Build a Forest explores Ecuador’s cloud forests as cultural territories shaped by human and more-than-human life. Through documentary and experimental photography, it reimagines how forests are perceived, and cared for across generations.

Notes on How to Build a Forest is an expanded photography and sound project developed in two cloud forests of Ecuador: the Mache Chindul Ecological Reserve and the community of Yunguilla. Combining documentary photography, experimental processes, speculative imagery, and sound, it explores the relationships between human and more-than-human life across time.

Colonial narratives have long portrayed tropical forests as untouched paradises, separate from human history and available for exploitation. This vision overlooks millennia of coexistence. Ideas such as Eduardo Neves’ concept of forests as cultural heritage challenge the divide between nature and culture, revealing forests as territories shaped by generations of human and non-human inhabitants.

In Yunguilla, whose name in Kichwa means “clash of clouds,” the community has spent over seventy years restoring its cloud forest after decades of deforestation and charcoal production. Elders and younger generations gather in a mud house filled with ancestral tools to share memories and knowledge. In Mache Chindul, the creation of an ecological reserve in 1996 transformed the lives of thousands already living within its boundaries. While many left, others learned to live differently with the forest. Beto, for instance, replaced his chainsaw with attentive listening, learning to identify birds by their calls and contributing to scientific research.

These territories also preserve traces of the Yumbo and Jama Coaque cultures, whose relationships with the forest date back thousands of years. Bird-shaped whistles and culuncos, ancient paths connecting the mountains and coast, speak of ways of inhabiting these landscapes through coexistence.

Through infrared photography, thermal imagery, ultraviolet light painting, lumen prints, sound, and archival photographs transformed by fungi, the project speculates on how insects, bats, plants, and other organisms might perceive their environments. Photography becomes a space for multiple forms of knowledge and perception to meet.

The communities of Yunguilla and Mache Chindul continue to negotiate their relationships with the forest amid contemporary pressures. Their practices of care, adaptation, and collective decision-making reveal forests as living cultural territories, where knowledge is continually produced and the possibilities of inhabiting the world are reimagined.