Mayra Martell
Born in 1979 in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)
Lives and works in Mexico City (Mexico)
Mayra Martell is a documentary photographer from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She has worked primarily in areas of Latin America and Africa subjected to forced disappearance. Her largest projects in Latin America include Falsos positivos (2009), Cerro de Petare (2007), and Ensayo de la identidad (2005-2010). Falsos positivos, carried out in the impoverished outskirts of Bogota, documents the tragedy of young men who were kidnapped, killed, and presented as guerrilla casualties by the Colombian army. Cerro de Petare portrays everyday life in one of Caracas’ biggest and most violent slums. Ensayo de la identidad is a five-year project about the disappearance of women in Ciudad Juárez, a city whose social fabric has been torn by violence. Martell has received many distinctions and awards. At the 4th International Photobook Festival in Kassel, Germany, she won first prize in the Reviewer Award 2011 and second prize in the Dummy Award 2011. She is currently working on a project called Sexy Mafia which proposes an exploration of the concept of beauty in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico´s main drug-trafficking city.
For KB17, Mayra Martell has presented work from her series on Ciudad Juárez and the Western Sahara. Of her Ciudad Juárez series, she writes: “It’s been five years since the downtown started to disappear, becoming a battleground for drug cartels, the scene of murdered women and the vanishing place for countless people. Ciudad Juárez is the paramount example of a society that is consuming itself without being able to stop. I believe that there is something there in those spaces that makes people forget that other places exist; as if one had no past, like the city itself. Perhaps I like it because it has no memory, or at least not one as obvious as other places where I’ve been. It’s as if it had collapsed and something broke inside; it’s like the life-essence of someone in disgrace, so overwhelmed by her loss that she has become stuck, stranded in the same place; a place of sadness. Juárez is like an old and abandoned kitchen; as the sun rises, buses can be seen roaming about like iron cockroaches crawling on a dirty, retched floor; a floor in ruins; a lonely floor.”
