Yael Martinez's Projects

I almost never remember what I dream. Very few times do I awaken with images ringing in my head. But at that time, I had two recurring dreams. In one of them, a little girl ran into my arms. My father and brother were there, and also the girl who months later would be called Itzel, my firstborn. The other dream included memories of my childhood in my grandmother's house where I would play with my sister Miriam, as my grandmother Carmen, watched. Now with the passed time since these dreams started, I understand them better. When I was a boy, my sister Miriam and I, would sleep over every friday, at my grandmother´s house. She would sleep with my aunt Elizabeth and I, with my grandmother Carmen. I still remember the peculiar aroma of grandma´s bed. We used to stay awake telling stories, or singing. These were the memories that always came to my mind in the last stages of her illness. As her sickness progressed, I became too hermetic to communicate to my mother that I wished that grandma would die soon. I tried to avoid confronting something that was hard for me to accept because I knew that when she died, a part of me would also die. I could not stop feeling emptiness and infinite solitude observing her, so alone, lost in her world. Even though there were some instants that were brief flashes of lucidity in which her thoughts were fresh and she was again able to connect with us. She almost always spoke of going back home, and it is curious how a piece of land or an object can hold the key to the certainty of knowing that we were here; of our presence in this world; of everything that we lived, that we feel was real. My grandmother Carmen died on november, 2010. She had alzheimer´s disease and diabetes. Itzel was born october 25th 2009. I remember that days before her birth, I spent many nights not being able to sleep; I could not believe I was about to have a life in my hands. Dark root is born out of the necessity of getting to know myself, as well as my family. This need was generated from recent life experiences. The death of my grandmother, marked my existence and my way of life. This has created many questions and confrontations with what I am; awakening passions, desires, fears and obsessions that for some time, remained hidden. this is a story about my family about the genealogy, about life and death and the meaning of life.

“A people without memory is condemned to repeat their mistakes.” Guerrero is one of the Mexican States that have been most affected by organized crime; It is the second poorest and most violent state in the country. The condition of social and economic marginalization of Guerrero is becoming more evident. The crisis of the rule of law is increasingly alarming and forced disappearances are only one of the symptoms that prove it. In 2013, three of my brothers-in-law died. (They used to live in Iguala, the place from where the Ayotzinapa students disappeared). One of them was killed; the other two disappeared.) After these events I began documenting my family, and the families of other missing people, in order to capture in photographs the psychological and emotional breakdown caused by the loss of family members, especially for parents, children, and siblings. I am working with the concepts of pain, emptiness, absence, and forgetting. I’m seeking social and cultural clues that can allow me to create a personal account of the issues that families face when dealing with an unexpected death. Through the testimony and this particular issue, I want to show the relationship of intimate space to personal life experience, which is reflected in the social experience. I am thus trying to depict the situation which many families in this region face, which they live through daily, and which is one of the causes of the unraveling of Mexico's social fabric.