Lina Rincón and Juliana Gómez were both going through breakups when they started YUCA. The Colombian editors channelled their restlessness into a publishing project that became, in their words, a breath of fresh air and a kind of catharsis — a biannual bookazine devoted to art, photography, literature, and culture, designed between Bogotá and Barcelona with art director Carles Murillo. Each issue is organised around what the editors call an "alibi": a theme that functions less as a subject than as a pretext, an excuse to invite contributors from wildly different disciplines to approach the same idea from their own vantage point. The first alibi was gastronomy paired with "roots." The second was architecture paired with "migrations." The third was sound paired with "time."
The format is deliberately hybrid — too thick and too carefully produced to be a magazine, too varied in its voices to be a book. Printed in Barcelona on Munken Print White by Agpograf, with a 168-page softcover running 22 × 29 cm, each issue weighs 630 grams and feels like something you are meant to keep. Contributors have included quantum physicists, political analysts, and food anthropologists alongside photographers and illustrators, because the editorial premise demands it: the alibi must be approached from perspectives that would never meet in a conventional publication. The first issue won a Silver Laus Award for editorial design in 2017, confirming what readers of MacGuffin and The Gourmand — two titles the editors cite as kindred spirits — already sensed: that YUCA belongs in the growing family of publications that treat the printed object as a space for genuine intellectual adventure.
Named after the root vegetable that is a staple across Latin America — essential, versatile, deeply rooted — YUCA carries its origins lightly but unmistakably. The editorial work happens in Colombia. The printing happens in Spain. The readership is scattered across continents. The alibis keep coming.
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