Luciérnaga is, in many ways, a ritual. An attempt to exorcise unresolved traumas in the spectral landscape of Magnum photographer Yael Martínez's homeland in Guerrero, Mexico.
The work began in 2013 following the disappearance of three members of the artist's family. This tragedy gave rise to an investigation into the widespread violence of organised crime in the region, how it infiltrates everyday life and transforms the spirit of a place. He subsequently spent time with other families whose loved ones had disappeared. Through these encounters, connections extended beyond the artist's immediate family and across borders into Honduras, Brazil and the United States, forming a constellation imbued with the shared experience of endemic violence.
Throughout the work, images are interwoven with diary notes made in the field. Martínez wrote them while grappling with the range of emotions brought by the aftermath of loss and the process of dealing with grief alongside families who had never had the opportunity to mourn. We do not see death in Luciérnaga, but its omnipresence is felt throughout, lingering in the shadows of every photograph. Each image is painfully marked by the consequences of calculated violence that arrived unseen and undetected, leaving behind the immense void of a missing loved one. Yet there is always a sense of hope inspiring the creation of this work.
Between 2019 and 2023, Martínez began a series of interventions in his photographs, piercing the prints and then backlighting them. Bright rays emanate through the images in fluid shapes, casting light against a dark background. In this process, light undergoes a metamorphosis with the scenes depicted, evoking an alchemy from which something restorative, tentatively optimistic and resilient emerges.
It is through Luciérnaga's mixture of fantasy and reality that the extensively explored themes of violence in the Latin American context are re-examined. Feelings are expressed rather than evoked, and through the ordinary people who guide us through this book, room is given to the humanity of those traversing difficult territory while confronting violence's personal cost. Now gathered in book form for the first time, disappearances at the hands of organised crime and state violence receive a new representation, in which light illuminates darkness as the firefly leads us towards new possible realms.
