The work of the young photographer Persia Campbell has focused on processing the traumatic experience of quotidian violence as an inhabitant of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua in recent decades, and the issue of feminicide in particular, through a series of photographs that analyze and reconfigure the visual culture of the area.  On the basis of her formation in the visual arts as well as in design for film production, she constructs and reproduces representations of interiors that synthesize her subjective experience of domestic enclosure in response to the dangerous context, and at the same time draw on her research on the social history of the city and the role of stereotypical representations of women in its development and in the mentalities that underlie practices of corporeal aggression.

Campbell recreates environments from earlier times in Ciudad Juárez through carefully mounted sets, documented in photographs with a dense symbolic content, that recall the style, imagery, and use of color in the hyperrealist paintings by Audrey Flack and in the images of female roles created by Cindy Sherman in the 1970s.  She also introduces material allusions to the current political situation and the persistent warlike context in her native city, implicating her own history and body in these activations of visual archives, and underlining the presence of a reflexive, critical gaze from a female perspective.

In this way, the disquieting images from the photographic series titled Itinerary of a Woman on the Border (2020) and Reminiscences of Ciudad Juárez (2021) contribute to our awareness of the links between collective memory and personal experience and memory, questioning the normalization of violence and its instauration through the construction of imaginaries based on women’s bodies and fictions regarding female identity. In addition, in her most recent series titled Ficheras: the Last Cabaret , Campbell seeks to reappropriate from an intimate perspective the representations of the women in the cinematic genre known as fichera films, that are characterized by misogyny and exploitation of the female body.

-Karen Cordero Reiman