Antonella Tignanelli is an artist, and food is her medium. Based in Barcelona, she creates worlds around the table, turning the familiar act of eating into something full of possibility. Her work moves between her restaurant, Masa Vins, and Food Rituals, the project she started with Sandie Hamon, where ancient celebrations inspire gatherings that bring food, art and spirituality into the same room. There is a sense of discovery in what she makes, and an invitation to join in.

An invisible thread runs through it all. The places she has lived and the kitchens she has learned in stay with her, finding their way into her menus and her understanding of what it means to gather. Her personal values never seem to get lost in translation. A belief in community carries through the different forms her work takes, alongside a curiosity about the things we cannot quite explain. It’s thoughtful and full of intention, with plenty of room for fun. You get the feeling that she enjoys inhabiting these worlds as much as she enjoys creating them.

That connection between what someone believes, how they live and what they make is what drew us to Antonella for the Dou So Journal. We wanted to know the person behind these moments, and understand how a memory, a place or a belief becomes something others can experience together. Her work touches on so much of what excites us at Dou So: the possibility of making everyday life feel a little more imaginative, and a little more shared. We live for art, and we live for food. Why not bring the two together?

My earliest memories are my grandmother’s dishes. Among them, there’s one specifically that had to do with the turning point when I realised I was going to work with food in my life: her chicken with rice. It’s a dish that sounds simple but is quite complicated to nail, and quite sophisticated, in my opinion. You need that crispiness in the rice, the right amount of saffron, and perfectly cooked chicken skin.

I ate it once a week when I was little, but I had never cooked it before, nor did I really know the recipe. On my first trip alone with my friends, when we were sixteen, I was the only one able to do the groceries and plan the food for a whole week for a group of twelve teens. I obviously chose my grandma’s classics.

One morning, I was trying to figure out how to debone whole chickens with a huge butcher’s knife and then cook the rice with chicken. When I finally achieved it, it literally turned out exactly like hers. That morning, something inside me said, “I think this is what I’m meant to do in my life.”

Honestly, it’s always been very hard for me to sum up everything I do in just one word. Most of the time, I just say I’m a cook, and if there’s someone around me, they start to explain more details. Otherwise, it stays at that. I think it’s the most honest I can be. I really don’t like complicated job titles or contemporary inventions.

I was always very interested in cultural manifestations. I spent my teenage years and early 20s reading philosophy and going to art fairs and museums all over the world, as much as I could. That was my school, and it served me for learning how to think and to express myself through different media.

At the same time, in every culture I disembarked I would eat with the indigenous communities, learn how to cook with the grandmothers, and even learn in a nerdy way about the contemporary food scene of the cities and the chefs representing them. I think my work is a sum of all of those perspectives and the curiosity I had and still have, and the tools I learnt to express them.

I think my work is driven by this principle: to look for unity within the human race. When I travelled or moved from country to country, the first thing that caught my attention were all the differences in people's lives, but something always gave me comfort: how similar we are in our human condition.

In my restaurants I serve a variety of dishes from many nationalities. It's a sort of carnet de voyage, but the true work lies in finding similarities and thinking about the menu as a whole so that everything makes sense together.

I think this unity is something we must work towards in the broken world that we have today. Not from a globalization and erasure of differences perspective, but from the acceptance of the visible differences and the certainty of invisible sameness.

Mexico, Peru, Japan, Greece are among the strongest.

Tomato is a very comforting ingredient for me, probably because of my Italian genetics. I also happen to live in Spain now, home of some of the world's best tomatoes. So I'd say that is one ingredient I use a lot of when it's in season.

The end of Capitalism.

Political agendas.

Everything which is not man made I find beautiful by default.

Traveling, reconnecting to these different landscapes, smells, realities. Time alone, introspection, answering these questions :)

A little fisherman's hut on a Greek island where we go every year. The bed is 4 meters away from the crystal water. Sometimes at night you cannot sleep because of the sea banging on the door. We just go in and out of the sea all day long, eat, lay in bed, read, repeat…

There is a vase I bought in Turkey like 10 years ago, in a very special antiques place in Antalya. Don't imagine a fancy boutique, but rather a ruin with a very charismatic sales guy who became our friend and invited us to eat the best lamb of our lives.

This vase travelled from Turkey to Berlin, where I was living at the time. Then it travelled to Argentina and now sits in my living room in Spain. I can't believe how many kilometers it did, and looking at it I can tell these weren't its only adventures.

I believe we have more power than we think we do. I believe we must be kind and helpful and be part of a community. I believe we must go beyond ourselves to achieve collective change.

Encants is a huge chaotic flea market, probably the place I visit the most in my day to day, as I buy a lot of things for my events there. La Cova Fumada is one of my favorite restaurants, a place that really stayed authentic to its original identity despite everything changing around it. Fundació Miró is my favorite museum in the city. Los Feliz for vintage clothing. Masa is my restaurant. I truly love to hang there. The ambiance is very chill, and it's fun and unfussy.

Surrounding myself with great humans and being very selective of the people I bring into my work environments and my home has been the ritual that gave me the most peace in my life. It makes me grateful every day and thankful for the beauty in life.

Magic is a part of life. It always has been and it will always be. It is as real as everything we can see or touch, except it has been put into question to take away some of our greater powers as human beings.

In ancient cultures there's no arguing that magic was a part of the culture and of the lives of people. It was only in recent times that we think it belongs only in mythology books, and we see that as a progress in human history. Science over magic is the one true way they conquered our minds, in my opinion.

Magic is, for me, knowing how to use the energies of the universe, channeling them and being able to transform reality with them.

Antonella’s world reminds us how much we bring to a table: the places we’ve lived, the people who taught us, the things we believe in. Her work makes you want to join in, try something unfamiliar and see where your own imagination might take you. At Dou So, the table is part of how we bring people together, and this journal grows from that same goal. Conversations like this remind us that we’re all finding ways to create and add something to one shared world… Thankfully there's still so much to make, taste and dream up!

Antonella Tignanelli is a chef, artist and co-founder of Food Rituals, and the founder of Masa Vins in Barcelona. Explore her work at food-rituals.com and follow along at @maryavocado, @foodritualss and @masa.vins.

Thank you for being here.