Gomma Photography Grant 2023
before the last lilac blooms
Photographer
Riel and Bianca Sturchio
before the last lilac blooms
22 Feb, 2024
“before the last lilac blooms,” is a collaborative decade-plus film photography project between twin siblings Bianca Sturchio (she/her) and riel Sturchio (they/she). riel is queer, and someone who lives with chronic illness in the spectrum of disability, and Bianca is queer and disabled. The collaborators utilize photography to provoke and examine the vulnerability they experience from their unique manifestations of queer identity, illness, and disability. Throughout their lives, the otherness of being categorically named “the twins” placed a singular and inseparable identity upon Bianca and riel. riel and Bianca respond to their internalized interconnectedness from being mistaken for one another and use photography to reimagine their separate and connected identities within their shared realities. riel and Bianca's photographs oscillate between reality and fantasy, creating ‘another world’ by photographing the mundanity of everyday life, and documented and selfconstructed scenes. Through rich color, ambiguously cropped images of the body, visual metaphors, and sincere portraits, they convey celebratory, challenging, and often invisible aspects within the intimate world-building they share, imagine, and create.
About the photographer
Riel and Bianca Sturchio
Bianca Sturchio (she/her) is a mixed-media artist and graduate holding a MSW (2020) and BSW in (2019) from the University of Southern Maine. Bianca uses her lived experiences of disability and queerness to inform both her professional and creative pursuits. Bianca explores the tactility of layered materials, and experiments with mark-making, use of color, and repetitive patterns in her pieces. She uses art as an emancipatory tool to express the implications of living inside a unique body and mind. riel Sturchio (they/she) uses their experiences as a queer, chronically ill artist to provoke, and criticize socially idealized normative fantasies of beauty, ability, and gender identity. They pair their academic background in critical queer phenomenology, bodily disorientation, and affect to explore the sculptural tactility of sound, the mediation of distance through varieties of touch, and the value of bodily awareness. They are interested in how their body is forced into disorientation through chronic disease and use this disoriented perspective as a foundation for active witnessing rituals. riel and Bianca have been generously supported through: Film Photo Award (2023), Artist Catalyst Grant (2022), Center for Photographic Arts (2022), Interchange Grant and Fellowship (2021-2022), Robert Giard QUEER|ART Foundation (2020), and the New Orleans Photo Alliance, Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography (2020).
