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Colombian muralist Katherinn Martínez, known as Cucaracha Biónica, has built her artistic practice around the relationship between women, territory, and transformation. Through murals created in public spaces, her work explores female representation, collective memory, and the deep connection between people and the natural environments they inhabit. Her artistic journey has been shaped by a desire to tell stories of empowerment, resistance, and healing, always placing women at the center of the narrative. Across walls and communities, her murals become visual dialogues and spaces where local histories, traditions, and everyday experiences are transformed into images that celebrate both identity and belonging.
Beginning with the Territory
Every mural begins long before paint touches the wall. For her, creation starts with research, observation, and immersion. Arriving in a new place means understanding its people, its customs, and especially the roles women play within that territory. Their labor, rituals, and daily practices become the foundation from which each mural grows. Every mural is different because each place has its own character. Its stories, rhythms, and collective knowledge become the essence of the work, translated into a visual language that feels authentic to the surrounding community.
The Environment as a Creative Meeting Point
The surrounding environment is not simply a source of inspiration but the starting point of the entire process. Landscape, community, memory, and local culture all converge into what she describes as a creative meeting point. Rather than creating from a distance, she builds her work through direct engagement with place, allowing each mural to emerge from its surroundings rather than be imposed upon them. The territory becomes both subject and collaborator.
Color as Emotion
Color occupies a central role in her artistic language. For her, color is much more than a visual decision; it is a powerful tool for communicating emotion and creating poetic meaning. Through experimentation with different palettes, she constructs atmospheres that help convey the emotional and symbolic dimensions of each piece. Among all aspects of her practice, exploring color remains one of the most exciting and transformative parts of the creative process.
When Emotions Take Over
Because her artistic practice is deeply connected to her emotional world, creative difficulties often emerge from within. A bad creative day is not necessarily about lacking ideas or technical ability. Instead, it appears when frustration becomes overwhelming and begins to consume the process itself. These moments can create distance between intention and execution, making it difficult to move forward. Yet recognizing those emotions and learning how to navigate them has become an important part of sustaining a creative life over time.
Music, Memory, and Cultural Narratives
Inspiration arrives in many different forms. Music plays a particularly important role, with powerful female voices often accompanying her creative process. Literature and storytelling also influence the way she thinks about images and representation. Perhaps more unexpectedly, food serves as another source of inspiration. For her, recipes, ingredients, and culinary traditions contain memory, identity, and stories passed from generation to generation. Much like murals, they become ways of preserving and transmitting culture. Before dedicating herself fully to muralism, she was already interested in understanding how different forms of expression communicate meaning, a curiosity that continues to shape her work today.
Slowing Down the Way We Experience Art
One of her strongest wishes is that people spend more time with art. In a culture increasingly driven by speed and constant consumption, she hopes viewers can slow down, observe more carefully, and allow themselves the time to reflect. Art, she believes, deserves attention beyond the immediate image. She also advocates for a more responsible use of public space, one that moves beyond individual ego and considers the territory, the community, and the people who will encounter the work long after it is completed.
Representation and Connection
When someone stands in front of one of her murals, the hope is simple but deeply meaningful. She wants women to feel represented. She wants them to recognize themselves in the stories being told, to feel inspired, and to experience an emotional connection with the work. Representation, in this sense, becomes more than visibility, it becomes a form of recognition and collective empowerment.
Influences and Creative Companions
Among the artists who have accompanied her journey, Paula Bonet remains one of the most significant influences. Having followed her work since adolescence, she continues to admire the sensitivity and strength present in Bonet’s artistic language. Music also remains a constant companion. Female rap artists such as La Gata Cattana, Las Ninyas del Corro, and Faenna provide energy and inspiration, while Colombian cumbia connects her directly to the folklore and cultural memory of her homeland.
Looking Ahead
When imagining future artists for Art & The City, Cucaracha Biónica highlights a number of Colombian creators whose work she deeply admires, including Agria, Nats Garu, María Tarazona, Rito Sin Sermones, and Violenta.
In her universe, murals are not simply images painted onto walls. They are acts of listening, learning, and connection. Spaces where women, territory, memory, and nature come together to tell stories that might otherwise remain unseen.
Explore more of her work and follow her on Instagram.
