Front Cover: Cover Image
As artist, academic, and public rhetor, Adela C. Licona addresses the surface and the
depth of our daily lives through visual, textu/r/al, and lived literacies. With the camera
in hand, Licona interrogates the coming together and coming apart at the fold—the
inside/outside—of the vivid con/textu/r/al forms and functions across the land, bodies,
and built environments. She is interested in detail and its connection to a larger context
as a means to provoke and participate in new ways of looking and seeing that allow us
to imagine new ways of being and relating particularly around our interconnections to
one another and to the earth.
This photo, in particular, considers human relationships to im/mobility and the
circulation of goods in a consumer society. From her roadside memorials/descanso
series, Licona’s images instantiate her interests in the production of im/mobilities and of
(contested) knowledges in space—who gets written or otherwise in/visibilized into and
out of space through material practices, spatialized mis/representations, and historic
accounts. She has started to document (research, archive, photograph, and film) public
memorials, especially roadside memorials or descansos in their ephemeral spirit as she
sees these public~intimate/intimate~public spaces as spaces of recognition, resistance,
and devotional reflection. Her interest in material space, spatialized representations,
rhetoric, and public scholarship is manifest in her roadside memorials project.