Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
In a modest home on the edge of Bogotá, a forest lived in exile. Redrawn leaf by leaf from memory with ink and conviction, it existed not on maps or in satellite imagery, but on sheets of paper, in the hands of a man who never called himself an artist.
Abel Rodríguez was born sometime between 1934 and 1941 in La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon. He died on April 9.
Rodríguez became widely known for his finely detailed drawings of Amazonian flora, now shown in museums around the world. Yet to him, the drawings were never art. They were memories made visible — an attempt to honor and transmit a world increasingly under threat.
From his uncle, a sabedor or “man of knowledge,” Rodríguez learned the names, cycles, uses and spirits of plants: when to harvest, which animals fed on which fruits, how the chagra — a garden borrowed from the forest — could be returned stronger than before. He learned to see the rainforest not as a collection of species, but as a single living system, both material and spiritual.
In the 1980s, Rodríguez worked as a guide for visiting researchers. He could not read or write fluently, but he could identify hundreds of plants and describe their roles in extraordinary detail. That knowledge might have remained oral if war hadn’t intervened. In the 1990s, guerrilla conflict displaced Rodríguez and his family to Bogotá. There, without land to plant, he began to draw.
The early works were rough, made with felt-tip pens. But as he began to “go to the forest in his thoughts,” the drawings sharpened. The pages filled with trees and vines, yet retained breathing room — spaces to wander. His work was encyclopedic in the memory of cycles: floods and fruits, bird migrations and soil shifts. He knew where the scent of a flower lingered, and how long before its petals fell.
Recognition came slowly. In 2008, the Museo Botero in Bogotá showed his work. In 2014, he received the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands. Then came Kassel, São Paulo, Venice, Gwangju. Still, Rodríguez resisted the artist label. “We don’t have that concept,” he told MoMA in 2024. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft.”
He believed that knowledge passed down outside its place of origin withers. The Nonuya language is nearly gone. The forest he drew is shrinking. Drawing, for him, may have been a way of walking through that world again — tracing its forms so it might endure a little longer.
He offered no manifestos. Asked what his work meant, he once shrugged: “Well, nothing. I only show a simple image.” But behind each line lay a truth: that remembering is a form of resistance, and that a forest, even when felled, can still take root in the mind.
Banner image of Abel Rodríguez, courtesy of Simon Hernandez.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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