A Book Talk with Eli Nixon: An EDC & Vital Matters Virtual Event
October 2
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6:00 pm
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7:30 pm EDT
RSVP below and join the Ecological Design Collective and Vital Matters for a conversation with artist, designer, and activist Eli Nixon about their new book, Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs. Nixon’s new book is an illustrated proposal and manual for activation (and complication!) of a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs, with accompanying field notes to help navigate the quagmires and vistas of primordial futurizing through reparative returns, habitat restoration, cardboard transformation, time encapsulation, feasting, impossible dancing, parading and much more.
This event will take place virtually on the EDC platform on Wednesday, October 2nd, starting at 6pm EST (Meeting ID: 955 1193 8558 & Password: Books)
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of drawings, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation.
A Rhode Islander on Narragansett and Wampanoag land, Eli is affiliated with New Georges Theater, The 3rd Thing Press, and Company One’s PlayLab Unit, among others. They hold MFAs from Brown University and Goddard College, and a BA from College of the Atlantic. Their work has been featured at venues like Judson Church and Philly Fringe, supported by various foundations. Eli is also active in antiracism work and proposes a new holiday honoring horseshoe crabs, while supporting local and global justice movements.
Buy and read Nixon’s new book by heading to The 3rd Thing Press’s online store.
Vital Matters is also selling signed copies of Bloodtide to EDC members at a reduced price. To buy one of these special copies please email Michele Minnick at vitalmattersbaltimore@gmail.com.
You can get a sneak peak of Bloodtide by visiting Eli Nixon’s website page, the book’s publisher, or watching this short video! Eli Nixon worked with the library and residents of Providence, RI, to create this amazing installation of critters, with the aim of decentering humans through art in a public space:
450 Million Year Timeline of Organisms: Installation from Spring 2024
BookReviews:
“Bloodtide gifts us a river to wander down where we can drift away from the bullshit… a holiday that rewilds us towards a life-affirming way of being in the world. And more than a holiday, Bloodtide extends us a glitch to enter that predates the trauma of all that clouds our imaginations.” – brontë velez, Creative Director, Lead to Life
“It’s hard to write about Eli Nixon’s book because it’s a book about fumbling into embodied relation and words are just a jump-off to living. It’s about what you can do in a weekend with geologic time. It’s a tender score for beautifully imperfect — and transformative — work… in the form of a series of proposals, invitations, and field notes… There is a crinkly poetry to Bloodtide, repurposed poetry, the poetry of wild rebirth snatched from the recycling bin. Words I thought I knew cast shadows that turn them into other beings entirely. Humble is an important word in this book, and so is impossible, and so is cardboard. ..It’s a box full of wild objects, and the wild space between them. It’s might-y — might like “could be” not like brute force. It expands, has expanded me. I gasped a few times and my nose twitches with the smell — the “rutty musk of the freer beasts within us.” It is radical, it is wise, it is alive.” -Agnes Borinsky, writer & theater-maker, author of Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 and Sasha Masha
Note: Please create an EDC account to RSVP for the event and join our international network of environmental activists!
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