ADELA LICONA with JOANNA SANCHEZ-AVILA

Adela C. Licona’s photography captures surface & depth. w/ camera in hand, she studies facets, textures, colors, patterns, & forms at times to document and at times to interrogate the mundane. she approaches her object photography as well as her eco-scapes, arte urbano/city-scapes, and body-scapes as “assemblages of stories so far.” through a developed intensity in focus, her photographs often invite deeper inspections of the everyday. her work, referred to as “contemplative” and “queer” and noted for its depth as well as its “delicacy & intimacy,” often explores interstices, propinquities, relational proximities, blurred boundaries, distortions, abstractions, & bent light. as queer chican@ artist, scholar, & public rhetor, she is interested in provoking & participating in new ways of seeing & looking — reorientations, meaningful distortions, & re/visionings that are informed by — and might also inform — radical re/imaginings of being, belonging, and relating to one another, to everyday objects & everyday-scapes, to histories & bodies, to places & practices, and to the earth.

Hondureña-Americanah and Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English (RCTE) doctoral student, Joanna E. Sanchez-Avila believes in the power of everyday stories and their craftings through creative expressions including telling, reflective writing, visual texts, and the multi-modal/sensorial. Her research interests are informed by fa(t)shion’s ‘style as resistance’ ethos and are undertaken at the intersections of rhetoric, memory, and feminist studies within the contexts of body politics, cultural memory, narrative, autoethnography, media literacy, feminist pedagogy, and public policy. Drawing from memory studies, with an emphasis on autobiographical memory and haunting/s as counter-memory, Joanna explores how transcultural memory and practices of remembering shape multiply-situated identity formations of and by Honduran and Honduran-Americans across diverse platforms of access.