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/// Art & Wellbeing /// February 2022 Visual artist, communicator and Master in cultural management. Catalina draws inspiration from her own emotions, nature and artistic expressions such as dance and literature to create organic paintings that express rhythms, cadences, movements and cycles. She explores concepts such as life, death and inner time in relation to universal organic time, and in contrast to the time of the contemporary world, dictated by mechanics and productivity. Each of her works is an invitation to create a connection with our organic essence, with the natural and universal rhythm of our body and mind. Her works have been exhibited in La Casa Centro Cultural de Medellín and in the exhibition hall of the Itagüí station of the Medellín Metro. She has also participated with some of her works in galleries such as Artrade.co and Espacio Cinco 33. Residency at El Boga The project "Mompox: the intimacy of forms", seeks to identify the rhythms, colours, movements and cycles of Mompox, through its nature, its human relations and its artistic and cultural manifestations. Contact www.cataarango.com Tel. 304 331 0653 cata@cataarango.com IG: cataarangop

We successfully completed our co-designer workshop. Read our coverage (in Spanish) here Lo Nuestro November 22-26 2022 , in person, Mompox, Bolívar, Colombia Click here to see the collection's catalog Interdiseño Mompox22
Limited spaces (8) Casa Taller El Boga and Ximena Rozo Design, with the support of the Colombian Ministry of Culture, held an on site co-creation workshop in Mompox from 22-26 November 2022 (with several online sessions in October-November). Colombian artisans in carpentry, forging, weaving and pottery worked with three designers with extensive international experience. This meeting of creatives and artisans resulted in a collection of utilitarian objects representative of the cultural richness of our territory with a contemporary projection and reach to national and international markets with the intention to expand economic opportunities to artisan communities. Program: Visits to the artisans' workshops and exchange of knowledge Design conceptualization* Prototype Generation* Ideation workshop* Prototype Development* Collection launch & Design exhibition in Mompox *The items marked with an asterisk took place before the in site encounter. About the designers Ximena Rozo / Colombia / USA https://www.ximenarozo.com/ Ximena is a textile designer from Universidad de Los Andes with a Masters in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute, NY, certified in Design Thinking from Georgia Tech and MIT. Her design experience expands from aeronautical, digital and handmade design. Ximena holds 15 patents in aerospace design in the USA for her work on the Boeing 787. Ximena also has 25 years of experience working with the craft sector. Her international design studio, Ximena Rozo Design, highlights the value of tradition, wisdom and technical skill of the ancestral craft, which, in combination with contemporary design, allows handmade objects to enter national and international markets and, in this way, opens up an opportunity for economic development for Colombian artisans. Natalia Porter / Mexico / USA https://nataliaporter.com/ Natalia Porter is an industrial designer from UAM-X in Mexico, with a master's degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute, and a master's degree in Visual Arts from CUNY, NY. She has 12 years of experience designing products for the home, which are industrially produced for a mass market in the United States. She also creates handmade objects, specializing in art, jewellery and ceramics. She teaches industrial design at San Francisco State University. Natalia's work has been featured in major international media (television and print) and has been reviewed by The New York Times on multiple occasions. Her work has been exhibited and sold internationally, including the design shops of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Japan, the Glasgow School of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca and the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico. Petra Lilja / Sweden (Virtual) www.petralilja.com Petra Lilja is a Swedish Industrial Designer, Curator and Design Educator, with an MFA in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute, NY. Through her work, Lilja explores creative ways to address her deep concern for the environment. She has worked as a design teacher as well as director of the Design + Change programme at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Cost of participation Colombians: COP 1,800,000 in private room Foreigners: USA 600 in private room Included all co-creation sessions, breakfasts and lunch (2 meals per day), accommodation in private room (arriving on the 21st, departing on the 27th of November 2022). Two previous virtual sessions of maximum two hours each. Transportation to Mompox is not included. Organised by:

//Anthropologist //Intercultural Mediator May-December 2022 María Fernanda Márquez Miranda (Mafe), is an anthropologist from the Universidad Nacional, with roots in Mompox. Mafe has a passion for the gastronomy and traditional music of Mompox, to which she dedicated her thesis El Conjuro de lo Sabroso . In addition to her people skills, her social commitment and her executive capacity, Mafe has a great talent for photography and creative writing. In 2021, she received two grants from the Ministry of Culture (Programa Nacional de Estímulos y Jóvenes en Movimiento), to carry out two projects in Mompox entitled Laboratorio Creativo de Músicas y Danzas de Chandé de Tierra Firme and Cápsulas Viajeras de los Nadie. Mafe was already associated to El Boga from February to August 2021 and co-created with resident Silvana Kovalski the collective el.mafufo, a collective that seeks to "make more people fall in love with the gastronomy of Mompox and the cultural and environmental context that makes it possible". María Fernanda acted as liaison between the artistic residents of Boga and the community of Mompox. She helped residents to develop a rich cultural agenda for the community. Instagram: mar.fernanda_ Email: mfmarquez@unal.edu.co Blog: bit.ly/letraslentesycucharas

Courtesy: Culture Ministry Photo credits: Fausto Diaz Pasmiño The 46th National Artists' Salon was inaugurated in a circuit created along the Magdalena River basin, from its source in San Agustín to its mouth in the Colombian Caribbean. Download the biennale's Roadmap here (in Spanish)

// Textile artist //July 2025 Adriana was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She has a degree in Textiles and Fine Arts from the University of the Andes and a Master's degree in Fashion Design from the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Italy. For seven years she lived in the People's Republic of China, where she worked in design, manufacturing and quality control in the textile industry, while developing her personal artistic practice in illustration and creative workshops for children. She currently works as a professor in the Department of Design at the University of the Andes. In addition to her teaching work, she has collaborated with Artesanías de Colombia on projects to strengthen the productive capacities of artisans in various regions of the country, through workshops on textile techniques, design and co-creation processes. Her main interest lies in the narratives produced through textiles and how crafts become a means of expression and social storytelling that can empower communities. She seeks to understand the connection between manual crafts and emotional well-being, and how these practices can generate spaces for connection. In recent years, she has merged her passion for textiles and illustration, developing mini-collections of embroidered garments that integrate both disciplines. El Boga Residence The ‘Reconfigurations’ project focuses on exploring social and cultural narratives through textiles. For her personal project, Adriana will explore the themes of grief, loss and memories, focusing on the brain processes that occur when someone close is no longer there. She offers creative workshops inspired by the imaginations and memories of the participants, and the translation of the images into textile techniques. The workshops will cover topics such as composition, colour theory, translation of images into pixels and the development of modules for textiles. Contact @labaracaldo

//Artist, researcher, educator //May-june 2025 Adriana Salazar is a Colombian artist, researcher and educator. She has lived in Mexico City for 10 years. Her work plays with the ways in which Western traditions of knowledge tend to separate the living from the inanimate. Over the last decade she has committed her artistic practice to working with the water flows of central Mexico, with the aim of questioning the ways in which water is often considered a lifeless object. Her projects adopt collective and community practices as a way of dismantling the division between active subjects of knowledge and inert objects to be known. Adriana has exhibited her artistic projects in spaces such as the Passerelle Contemporary Art Centre (France), the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim (Germany), the CA2M (Spain), Havremagasinet (Sweden), the Pratt Institute (USA), the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín (Colombia) and the Museo del Barrio (USA), among others. She has been a teacher and pedagogy forms an integral part of her projects. She also writes and edits books and texts for artistic and academic publications. Her publications include the book Encyclopedia of Living and Dead Things: Lake Texcoco and Water Spells, the latter produced with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. El Boga Artistic Residency During her stay at El Boga, Adriana will continue research that she began in the lake of Chapala, Mexico, in 2023, together with the editor Gabriela Castañeda. Meetings were held in riverside communities to understand the socio-ecological crises and forms of resistance that characterise the banks of this body of water. In these meetings, the diversity and uses of certain plants (regenerative, food, medicinal, ritual and textile) appeared persistently in the way they care for and defend the water and the lives that inhabit it. In Mompox, Adriana will trace the links between local plants, their uses, the materiality they condense and the stories of water stewardship that link human communities with local flora, their histories, uses and knowledge. With the kind support of : sumadrenaturaleza.org   and   Contact: adrianasalazar.net

//Artist, designer //March-April 2025 Aislinn Ross is an artist and designer whose work explores the female body, identity and materiality. Since studying visual arts, she has addressed these issues through different media, from photography and drawing to concrete sculpture. In 2020 she founded Sincreto, a creative space that began as a personal exploration and has become a place for catharsis and dialogue. Her work challenges the ideals imposed on the body and highlights diversity as a central element of her artistic practice. Through artisanal processes and the use of materials such as concrete and recycled elements, she creates pieces that are not only functional, but also tell stories and generate spaces for validation and reflection. Through Sincreto, she has participated in design and art fairs, connecting with a community that finds a reflection of its own history in her work. El Boga Residency During her residency at El Boga, she will investigate the relationship between the body and Mompox's traditional building materials, such as clay for bricks and tiles. She will explore the intersection between the structural and the symbolic, integrating concrete and local techniques such as filigree to sculpt bodies that emerge from the history and memory of the place. Her creative process will be guided by the stories of women from the community, transforming their experiences into sculptural forms that speak of strength, transformation and rootedness. The result of this material and conceptual exploration will be presented in a final exhibition, where the created bodies will bear witness to and carry stories that resonate in the collective memory. Contact @sin.creto

//Visual artist //October Photo: Clara Lacasse @carbsnproteins Alejandra Zamudio is a Colombian artist who lives between Bogotá and Montreal. She earned her degree in visual arts from Concordia University (2019) and has since dedicated herself to drawing, creating independent publications, and teaching art to children. Her artistic practice is based on the need and pleasure of learning to observe and represent the movements of the spirit. For the past few years, Zamudio has sought to represent the feminine spirit in the form of a house. Exploring this architecture has led her to discover unknown doors and meet unexpected visitors. She has thus developed a pictorial world that gives rise to the symbols of dreams; to the stories and angels of her childhood; and to the different relationships that make up life. El Boga Residence During her two months of residency at El Boga, Zamudio will continue working around the figure of bats/angels, doors/portals, and the river. Her project will focus on creating a textile and sculptural installation that relates the three symbols mentioned above. This will also be a good time to exchange stories of visitations: both angels and bats, with the local community. Contact @peluzator

//Anthropologist/photographer/feminist/embroider //May-June 2023
Amalia is a Colombian anthropologist, photographer, feminist and embroiderer. She considers herself radically transdisciplinary and is interested in the intersections between textiles, materialities, oral history and ageing. She studied Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes with academic options in Literary Creation; Gender and Sexuality; and Photography. Activist against gender violence in universities, she has experience in writing and editing texts, image construction and ethnography. El Boga Residency: Mecer, mecer, mecer (Rock, Rock, Rock) During her residency, she will research and record the history, making and life of rocking chairs in Mompox. He wants to work with the artisans behind the craft, as well as to find and recreate the stories behind these chairs... their times, uses and affections. Contact Instagram: @amarilla.9

// Psychologist, anthropologist and embroider //October-november 2024 //Scholarship for Art and Mental Health sponsored by Asteri Law Firm Ana María Roa Bocarejo is a psychologist, anthropologist and embroiderer. Throughout her career she has accompanied psychosocial processes of people who are victims of the Colombian armed conflict, using tools of artistic expression as a means to process pain symbolically. Embroidery has been a loving life learning process, which has become her practical refuge for several years. Currently, she is dedicated to exploring the textile world, creating learning spaces in which vulnerability can be accommodated from compassionate and mobilizing places. She has a particular interest in taking embroidery beyond the aesthetic, and mixing it with different formats.  El Boga Residence Remnants of momposino care During her residency, she will carry out textile mapping that will seek to capture the multiplicity of experiences of people who are dedicated to care work in Mompox. To do this, she will carry out workshops with a therapeutic approach with caregivers, encouraging dialogue and reflection on her profession through textiles. The spaces are designed to encourage artistic curiosity from enjoyment and collective containment. Contact @ _ana_rro

//Visual artist, lecturer, cultural manager //October- november 2024 Her academic training begins in the Visual Arts with an emphasis on graphic expression, Photojournalism, documentary photography and a master's degree in Educational and Social Development. Andrea has recently expanded her interests within photography with the creation of narratives from the experimental and the family photographic archive. She has participated in various national and international group exhibitions, among which the 2019 Southern Art Biennial, in Cúcuta, Colombia with the project “Estru-culturas” Temporary border monuments”/Mobile sculptures; in 2020 in the collective exhibition ERRAR (Cooperativa Atkins) and the exhibition in the public space of the Galería Urbana project in Bogotá in 2015. As a lecturer and cultural manager, she has participated in the planning, execution and evaluation of strategies in the field of the arts, working with diverse populations; from sensory exploration in Early Childhood, youth, adults and artistic training for people with cognitive disabilities, in various urban and rural contexts. She is interested in the impact of artistic practices at the community level and how these generate actions in specific contexts and territories. Highlighting inequality in the human condition, especially in vulnerable populations such as children, women and workers. She also explores the political subjectivity of specific social groups, through the review and re-reading of public and family photographic archives. El Boga Artistic Residency Trans natura During her residency, Andrea seeks to explore ways to navigate civilizational collapse from everyday practices, creating community with non-human beings and strengthening the fabric of life. Methodologically, she is interested in discovering the symbolic worlds existing in multispecies communities, inhabited by human and non-human beings based on practices in relational aesthetics with the documentary archive as a tool, as an input and as an initial result of a process that can be sustained over time in the territory. Contact abpor3@gmail.com

//Butoh dancer, Actress y Ethno-educator //October 2022 Andrea Casallas is a Butoh dancer, actress and ethno-educator of Colombian origin based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, since 2005. Upon her arrival in Switzerland, she joined the Obini theatre group and participated in all the group's productions between 2007 and 2015. In 2013, she met the Swiss dancer, teacher and choreographer Susanne Daeppen, which allowed her to continue her training in Butoh dance, which she had begun in 2003 in Quito, Ecuador, with Susana Reyes, one of the most representative figures of Latin American contemporary dance and creator of the "Butoh of the Andes" dance style. From that moment on, Andrea focused her artistic development and creation on Butoh dance, continuing her training with teachers Yumiko Yoshioka and Minado Seki and with masters Tadashi Endo, Atutshi Takenouchi, Seisaku and Imre Thormann. In 2015, Andrea received the OFF-Stage scholarship from the Canton of Bern (Switzerland) which allowed her to deepen her knowledge of Butoh dance with Susana Daeppen in Switzerland, Tadashi Endo in Germany and Susana Reyes in Ecuador. At the same time, this scholarship allowed her to integrate her studies in Ethno-education to approach the ritual dances of the Arhuaco and Wayúu ethnic groups in Colombia. In 2021 she received the grant "Förderakzent 2021: Continuer - Beiträge für Kulturschaffende an Entwicklung und Vertiefung" (Contribution for cultural creators in development and deepening) from the Canton of Bern to realise her project Danzas del rio Magdalena in Colombia. Andrea has found in Butoh dance the perfect channel to develop an authentic and radical dance that offers an infinite range of creative and aesthetic possibilities that go beyond the concrete physical form. In her pieces and performances, the artist explores themes such as birth and death, femininity, the visible and invisible structures of nature and the human body, fragility and strength, archaism and modernity, based on a profound physical, sensorial, emotional and philosophical research that supports these themes and translates them into a dance language of her own. El Boga Residency: Dances of the Magdalena River The residency at El Boga is part of my project Danzas del río Magdalena, inspired by the Señal Colombia documentary "Danza Colombia - Trayecto Magdalena", which was awarded the "Förderakzent 2021: Continuer - Beiträge für Kulturschaffende an Entwicklung und Vertiefung" (contribution for cultural creators in development and deepening) of the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. Dances of the Magdalena River has as its main objective to have an in situ approach to the traditional dances of the communities bathed by the waters of the river. In this way, to engage with the cultural actors, dancers and choreographers of the riverside populations, to study the basic movements of some dances, to explore through improvisation the possibilities of integrating these movements into butoh dance and vice versa, as well as to gather first-hand information about the stories that are woven around the dances and their relationship with the river, the symbolism of movements, costumes and choreographic structures. Danzas de río Magdalena aims to be a door that opens the encounter with the origins of the dances, to the reflection on dance as an agent that transforms the dancing body and its socio-cultural context. Contact & Links: yuravida@hotmail.com https://yakwadance.wixsite.com/yakwadance