Lina Ruiz

//Chef, cultural activist and network weaver

//January 2026

Lina Ruiz (Bogotá) is a cook, cultural activist and network builder. She has been living in Barcelona since 2021 and her practice lies at the intersection of art, cooking and cultural mediation, using food, stories and dining as devices to activate collective processes around memory, identity, the body and territory. The experience of migration runs through her work, from which she asks how to inhabit a food culture of proximity from a diasporic body and how to cook in a tasty and situated way, attending to communities and territories in the context of the eco-social crisis. This search is woven together with other people to transform everyday pains into practices of care, listening and shared enjoyment. She is the driving force behind Micelio Cultural and co-founder of Las Jamaiconas, projects through which she has developed creative and research processes, workshops, performances and culinary laboratories in community contexts such as the El Sortidor Civic Centre and institutional contexts such as the Reina Sofía National Art Museum, the National Art Museum of Catalonia - MNAC and the Santa Mónica Art Centre, among others. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of the Andes, an Erasmus Mundus Master's in Global Markets, Local Economies - GLOCAL, and a postgraduate degree in Social and Solidarity Economy.

El Boga Residency

During the residency, she will develop ‘El olor de la guayaba’ (The Smell of Guava), a culinary-creative laboratory that investigates the link between food, memory, and identity through the evocative power of this fruit in Colombian culture. The questions: What does the smell of guava make you think of? What does that memory taste like? These questions serve as the starting point for a process that weaves together interviews, recipe exchanges and expanded cooking to trace a sensitive cartography of Colombia and build a living archive of food practices initially articulated around this fruit.

From this initial gesture, guava allows us to think about the country's collective memory and the stories that shape it. Based on the memories associated with this food, the project opens up drifts towards other situated food practices that speak of territory, intergenerational transmission, and local ways of relating to food.

The project draws on the local knowledge of the Mompox community and seeks to create resonances with testimonies previously collected in other territories of Colombia and in the diaspora. The result will take the form of a fanzine or community recipe book, a sound archive and a shared table where these memories can be heard and tasted together.

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Contact:

@linaruiz2405@miceliocultural

@las.jamaiconas