Terraza Alta V

2018 - Painting (Painting)

70 x 100 cm

Abel Rodríguez

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Abel Rodríguez’s precise, botanical illustrations are drawn from memory and knowledge acquired by oral traditions. They are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites. Terraza Alta V is part of a series of drawings that track the changing appearance and life of an area identified as Terraza Alta. The work functions like botanical plates, including written information recording the color and taste of the bark, the season when it blooms, where it grows and at what time of the year, both in his native Muinane language and in Spanish. From giant trees to small rodents, Rodríguez’s vividly detailed illustrations are deeply time-specific. At a glance, many of his pencil and ink landscapes appear to be the same. But after extended observation, one notices that every element, from leaf shapes to animal locations to flowers, change in accordance with the month and season depicted. For the artist, who is an internationally recognized expert in Colombian plants, these drawings are a means of recovering and sharing his knowledge of Amazonian ecology gained through teachings from his grandfather, a healer, and nearly seventy years of observation. His work is an ancestral portal to an advanced understanding of tree architecture, landscape ecology, plant and animal ecological relationships, and even climate change. Above all, Rodríguez’s drawings reflect a traditional knowledge that offers an alternative to scientific knowledge; it is not fragmented, but rather part of a complex integral world that can only be known from living on the inside as part of that world and not as an outside observer.

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Abel Rodríguez, or “Guihu” as he was originally known, was born in Nonuya in 1941, in the headwaters of the Cahuinarí River in the Colombian Amazon and raised by the Muinane. His uncle, a “sabedor” (man of knowledge), taught him about the local flora. In the 1990s, Guihu (who by then had adopted the Western name Abel Rodríguez) and his family fled their native territory and moved to Bogota? to escape violence in the jungle, settling in one of the Colombian capital’s poverty-ridden and peripheral neighborhoods. Despite this upheaval, Rodríguez found a way to preserve his family legacy and the ancestral knowledge of the medicinal plants and ecological systems of the Amazon basin through drawing. He became the official guide for botany researchers in the Colombian Amazon and was awarded multiple scholarships to document his plant knowledge. Unable to use oral transmission, which is used in the traditional setting, Rodríguez started drawing trees from memory to provide reference material for education and promote dialogue across the indigenous and scientific communities. As such, his practice represents the survival of Indigenous peoples, knowledge, and cultures. His works are also valued for their artistic qualities, the unique cosmovision they transmit, and for their convergence of Indigenous politics and art world discourses. Rodríguez’s drawings provide an alternative viewpoint to Western ideologies of nature as represented in the history of art, illustrating what a relationship with nature might look like if thought about as a partner.

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Colors:

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• memory.n.01
• ecology.n.02
• nature.n.03
• landscape.n.03
• rural.a.02