Eli Nixon
Speculative Queer Creative Nonfiction | Performance | Direct Theory
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. Eli performs naturedrag, draws cartoons, and concocts installations, flotillas and mobile sculptures on beaches, parking lots and stages. They are a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land and a New Georges affiliated artist. Eli has MFAs in Writing for Performance (Brown, 2018) and in Interdisciplinary Art (Goddard, 2009). They organize with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI and were part of artEquity’s 2019 national facilitator training. Eli’s current creative efforts include parenting a 12-year-old human, slowly learning trombone, and supporting local and planetary movements for abolition, reparations, and multispecies justice.
Bloodtide is manual for breaking some things and building some others. It’s a proposal for a holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs. It’s an invitation to expand time, to breathe for 450 million years, and to see each other and ourselves anew- with lunar receptors. Bloodtide gathers celebrants around an effort to not look past harm or deny relation while working to expand notions of time, nature, and ancestry. It calls us to recognize our reliance on the primordial blood of another to safeguard the likelihood of our future. It pushes for the reverse of extraction.* It’s a proposal addressing a need for new cultural practices. It’s an unfinished invitation to molt with strangers. It’s a provocation to spawn new conditions that enable horizontalism. Bloodtide is dedicated to the transformation of cardboard/ ourselves through the challenge and pleasure of paying homage in ways specific to horseshoe crabs, the local needs and strengths of each particpant, and the land on which we practice this holiday.