“Do Ants Have a Heart?”Care, Time, and (In)visibility in a Community Garden in a São Paulo Favela in Brazil

Abstract (English)

Seeded in May 2022 in a favela in São Paulo, Brazil, the Jojo Community Garden emerged from a partnership between local organizations and the municipal school where it now thrives. Once marked by invisibility and neglect—used as an informal dump, a site of substance use, institutional and sexual violence, and reportedly even as a clandestine mass grave—the space has, through collective action, been transformed into a terrain of territorial re-enchantment. From beneath the rubble of marginalization, a living practice of agroforestry and popular education has taken root, cultivating food, presence, and collective life.
This ethnographic research departs from the materiality of the garden to examine what it produces as a reconfiguration of urban lived experience. Through a dissident temporality that escapes the city's chronological, productivist, and market-driven logics, the garden institutes a sensitive regime, where the time of sowing, waiting, and harvesting reorganizes perception and bodily rhythms. It is not simply about planting or reaping, but about inhabiting an errant, non-linear temporality shaped by unpredictability and attentiveness to what lives or resists living.
This embodied time—where an eggplant may flourish or a collard green may need to yield its space—brings forth forms of corporeality that emerge through contact with the earth, with the vegetal cycles of life, and with collectivity. It is a production of other visibilities, shifting the gaze from the evident to the imperceptible, from rapid consumption to gestures of care. As one of the community leaders said, “Do ants have a heart? We can’t see it, but they do. And it’s what makes everything work.” This image condenses a politics of the senses that animates the garden’s daily life—what pulses, within the history of buried bodies and violence, in a land that creates life in the paradox of death.
The anthropological contribution of this research lies in rethinking conceptions of 'care', 'food practices', and 'community involvement' as expressions of a logic of immanence. Rather than conforming to the grammar of lack, hunger, or scarcity, which situates the territory within narratives of deprivation, the garden emerges as a space of potency, multiplicity, and daily reinvention. Rooted in a space historically shaped by violence, accelerated time, and structural invisibility, it enacts a radical restitution of time to the body. Through the act of eating what they cultivate, people not only transform their food practices but also reshape their ways of existing, inhabiting, and perceiving the world, turning absence into presence.