For This Colombian Photographer, Mecato Meals Is a Style of House

Growing up within the Suba, Costa Azul neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia, within the early ‘90s, the photographer Alejandra Loaiza always looked forward to a mecato.

Mecato is a Colombian term for snacks or small bites, including everything from empanadas to arepas to plantain chips and chicharrón, which are affordable and often found at street food stalls. More than a snack, mecato is a vital part of the social and cultural rhythm of everyday life in Colombia. When Loaiza would come home from school, she’d go straight to an arepa truck close to her home. When she thinks of Sundays at dwelling, she conjures the odor of tamales within the pots of her neighborhood bakeries. Mecato “gives life to the neighborhood,” Loaiza tells Vogue.

When she moved to Europe greater than a decade in the past, one of many issues she missed essentially the most was mecato, and particularly the late-night choices. In Paris, the place she lives now, “the only thing you can find at 3 a.m. is kebab, which is good,” she says, “but I mean, it’s crazy to find a little soup at 4 a.m. that makes you feel warm in the heart.”

The photographer got down to create a undertaking to have fun mecato and “the richness of the everyday rituals that bring life” to Colombia. She labored along with her buddy, the Colombian artist and set designer Jhonson Camilo Tovar Quintero, to make a collection of vibrant diptychs that inform tales of Colombian meals and tradition, that includes a mixture of meals stalls and eating places, Catholic iconography, and nationwide pastimes comparable to tejo, the nationwide sport of Colombia. For Loaiza, the undertaking is a strategy to “freeze those places that I don’t know if they will be there in 20 years.” Below, Loaiza shares the undertaking with Vogue.