Luciérnagas
Yael Martínez
Artist Statement
I started this project as an essay on resilience: a portrayal of those who have been through trauma and are still fighting violence in their communities, and of others who risked their lives emigrating to escape that violence and support the families they left behind, becoming their economic pillars.
These people and communities inhabit and endure a difficult territory, a space, a body. To make the images, I made prints and put pinpricks in the paper, then shone light through the holes and photographed them again. The pinpricks in the images are an analogy for trauma, and how we as human beings can transform bad energy and a bad situation, and turn them into something positive, changing darkness into light. Each print becomes a person, a body, and an analogy for us as human beings, and the beauty of the piece comes from the resilience of our souls resisting a territory, a space, a body. I aim to create work that reflects the time we live in and that responds to the Latin American as well as the Mexican identity. I believe that when photography engages with education, culture, and politics, we can create a better world with different voices and perspectives in life.
From Publisher's website