The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires is extending public engagement with its exhibition on Abel Rodríguez through a series of micro-mediations on Fridays at 5 p.m. during June and July 2026. The museum says the sessions will take place in relation to El árbol de la vida y la abundancia, a posthumous exhibition devoted to Rodríguez, the Colombian artist and sabedor of the nonuya people, and are included with museum admission.
The program is part of MALBA’s broader education and guided-visit offer, which the museum describes as dialogical and centered on Latin American art. According to the museum’s recorridos page, the micro-mediations are designed as spaces of exchange and participation for young and adult visitors, with no prior registration required. They are listed under the museum’s education program on Level 1, reflecting MALBA’s use of guided encounters not just as tour formats but as interpretive tools around major exhibitions.
Rodríguez’s exhibition gives these sessions particular weight. MALBA identifies El árbol de la vida y la abundancia as a posthumous show dedicated to Abel Rodríguez, who was born in the Colombian Amazon in 1941 and died in 2025. The museum also notes that he was born Mogaje Guihu, a name meaning “pluma de gavilán resplandeciente,” and that he belonged to the nonuya ethnic group. In its presentation of the micro-mediations, MALBA emphasizes that Rodríguez was trained from childhood as a sabedor, someone who could recognize and name the plants of the forest and understand their practical and symbolic uses.
That knowledge underpins the exhibition’s significance. The museum says Rodríguez translated his understanding of the Amazon through drawing and painting over three decades, using those media to reveal the relations among animals, people, and the territory of the forest inhabited by his community. The wording on MALBA’s event page underscores that his images reconstruct the Amazon rainforest from memory, suggesting an approach to art that is inseparable from ecological knowledge and cultural inheritance.
MALBA’s micro-mediations are meant to open that work up through direct conversation and observation. The museum says the dialogue with visitors will use questions to approach the visual language developed by Rodríguez and to consider whether his legacy opens the possibility of a harmonious coexistence between two worlds. The activity is scheduled to run from June 26 to August 21, 2026, with the event page noting repeated Friday sessions at 5 p.m.
The initiative matters beyond a single museum program because it places Indigenous and Amazonian knowledge at the center of a major Latin American art institution’s public education agenda. MALBA has framed these guided encounters as part of an approach that values exchange, participation and the distinct perspectives of Latin American art. In that context, the Rodríguez micro-mediations function not only as exhibition programming but also as a way of foregrounding the artist’s role as both maker and knowledge-holder within contemporary museum discourse.
