The Ankaria Foundation in collaboration with PhotoEspaña presents the Dummyworld project in Santander, an exhibition that puts into dialogue the work of Mayra Martell (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 1979) and that of Jon Gorospe (Vitoria, 1986), the two award-winning authors Ankaria Photo 2021. From complementary positions, both allow us to reflect on new expressive avenues for 21st century photography that move away from the documentary past of the image as an instant and anticipate different paths to explore in the age of the Internet, smartphones and social networks.
On the one hand, Wildhunting by Mayra Martell, reflects to the point of paroxysm the paradoxes that are generated on Instagram in relation to the representation of the self-image, a fictional world where the women of the Sinaloa drug traffickers (known as buchonas) exhibit themselves. So like the famous soccer couples (WAG) or the Kardashian sisters, a mix between intimacy and intimacy that is as surprising as it is incredible. On the other, the continuous web crawling that the Noraezean series by Jon Gorospe raises in relation to the Basque landscape through the Internet in its search for places not portrayed by the Google camera, a flânerie that brings us today closer to the identity of the place of a different mode than a few decades ago. If before the topographies were physical, now there is a new online cartography that can be manipulated in an easy and interested way.
