Images from the Flooded Rainforest is an exhibition by Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu), an Elder from the Colombian Amazon jungle, who, late in life, learned to draw to record ancestral knowledge entrusted to him by his community. 

This exhibition is the result of the Casiquiare | Biennale of Sydney, a national collaboration project with leading cultural institutions across Australia to present new works at the Biennale and curated exhibitions at institutions across Australia.  The exhibition by Abel Rodríguez is the result of this new collaboration.

Tilted rīvus, the 2022 Biennale extends international narratives about ways in which dynamic wetlands, rivers, and other saltwater and freshwater ecosystems operate as dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency. Taking as its premise that Indigenous knowledge systems have long understood non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be protected, the question now is: what might they say?

Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu) was born in 1941 in La Chorrera, Amazonas. He grew up in the Muinane community near the headwaters of the Cahuinari River in the Colombian Amazon, and his uncle who was a sabedor (man of knowledge) taught him the knowledge of plants. Rodríguez became el nombrador de plantas (the namer of plants). 

In the 1980s, Rodríguez became a guide for scientific researchers studying the tropical forest. In the following decade, the Colombian armed conflict and the exploitation of natural resources displaced Rodríguez and his family. They moved to Bogotá, where he met Carlos Rodríguez from Tropenbos International Colombia. This encounter led to Abel Rodríguez translating his knowledge of plants into drawings to preserve and share his stories.  

Rodríguez’s work is part of a cultural continuum inseparable from his relations to ancestral Country that exists out of and beyond the colonial time frame. Through his deep cultural knowledge and his extraordinary body of works, Rodríguez has found a way to preserve his legacy by ‘drawing his knowledge’. In so doing his works have become an ancestral treasure, a gift from the jungle to this globalised and homogenised world.