A Nonuya elder, Abel Rodríguez is from La Chorrera, on the Amazon's Igaraparaná River. This place continues to inspire his practice, which is based on translating customary knowledge of plants and trees into drawing and writing. In collaboration with Tropenbos, an international NGO with an office in Bogotá, Rodriguez first worked as a guide in the 1980s for Dutch scientists, sharing his knowledge of the ecology of Amazonian plant life and the classification of spe-cies. Forced off his land by armed militia, Rodríguez relocated to the outskirts of Bogotá, where he began drawing in the 1990s to communicate his knowledge of the plants of his homeland, their growth cycles, their names in the Nonuya language, and their medicinal properties and uses.

Rodríguez's practice is informed by displacement and by the imposition of Western education. He began to study shamanism, learning "how to understand the cycles of time and the ecological and cultural relationships in our world, but I did not get to learn how to heal." This early education, he explains, was cut short when he was sent to boarding school. His drawings of growth in the forests along the river are divided not by conventional seasons but by the time when certain species flower in a given year, when seeds and fruits are ready for harvest, and how water levels affect growth. Others center on the specific qualities and traditional uses of the trees native to the region, or on food-based species, charting the diversity of cassava, piña, and other edible plants.
Rodríguez's series The Cycle of the Maloca Plants documents the relation of the ancestral longhouse, used domestically and for ceremonies, to the seasonally changing flora around it. Recently, his practice has moved from documentation of nature to representing cosmologies. His drawing of the Tree of Life "narrates the origin of food for the indigenous people of the Mid River Caquetá."

- Pip Day