The Mexican state of Guerrero lies on the southern Pacific coast and is residence to the favored vacationer vacation spot of Acapulco. It’s additionally one of many nation’s most violent areas because of drug trafficking and cartel presence, and is one in every of six states that account for practically half of the nation’s whole homicides.
For artist and photographer Yael Martínez, the truth of organized crime turned extra pronounced when, in 2013, three of his members of the family disappeared. He started to talk with others in his group who had skilled related traumas and to attach threads throughout the borders of Mexico to Honduras, Brazil, and the US.
Luciérnagas, which interprets to fireflies, comes from Martínez’s meditation on this excessive brutality that “infiltrates daily life and transforms the spirit of a place,” an announcement says. Now printed in a quantity by This Ebook Is True, the poetic sequence punctures darkish, nighttime pictures with minuscule holes. When backlit, the photographs bear a blinding constellation of sunshine that distorts the photographs by which violence isn’t depicted however quite felt.
In a single work, for instance, a person holding a firework stands in a poppy area, a perforated cloud of smoke enveloping his determine. He’s performing an annual ritual on the sacred hill of La Garza, and the setting exemplifies a poignant contradiction between ancestral cultures and a crop that has been subsumed by capitalism and is important to cartel energy. An announcement elaborates:
We don’t see loss of life in Luciérnaga, however its omnipresence is felt all through, lingering within the shadows of every {photograph}. Every picture painfully underwritten by the results of a calculated violence that visited unseen and undetected, abandoning the immense void of a vanished cherished one. And but there’s at all times a way of hope that informs the making of this work.
Luciérnagas is accessible from This Ebook Is True. Discover extra from Martínez on Instagram.
