Theodora Eliezer is a New Orleans-based multimedia artist and futurist. Their practice is characterized by interconnected narratives in installation, lens-based media, digital and physical artifacts, and related critical theory. Much of their work explores non-linear time, panpsychism, and feminist considerations of the body, identity, aesthetics, and technoethics. Influenced by Masahiro Mori and Carlo Rovelli, their recent work is concerned with the future rights of sentient machines and the intersection of magick and quantum theory.

One of my core motivations as an artist is my interest in how art and media program the future, and how artists and storytellers have the ability to shift consensus reality through their work. As an extension of this line of thinking, all of my work includes elements of media theory, personal narrative, and interrogations of memory as a form of mythology. In my series Soft Decay I use the personal/collective mythology of childhood nostalgia to reclaim decomposition from the realm of the abject, repositioning it as a technology of care and nurturing.

My recent projects also include Patty Cake, which was made in response to the danger of physical proximity during the pandemic, exploring how trauma restructures the brain and our perception of potential risk. Filmed in early May 2020, Patty Cake is a 20 minute long video depicting me and my best friend playing a game of patty cake. The video is accompanied by an archive of risk assessment and disclosure documents related to engaging in non-essential touch during phase one of the quarantine. On a more subtle level, Patty Cake is also about the loss of community and intimacy in femme and queer spaces, using art as an archival practice that writes our identities and experiences into future discourse about Covid 19.

Like so many people, this past year I spent a lot of time alone contemplating my identity, the nature of reality, and non-linear time. Since last summer my practice has been undergoing a transformation, and in September of last year I began my current long-term project: writing three books called The Valley of the Green Glass Door. These three books look like matching vintage chess manuals from the 1800s, but they are actually interlocking instructions for how to bend time. This project is influenced by game theory, New Orleans culture and lore, quantum physics, Hermetic alchemy, and the mystery cults of Ancient Greece. The Valley of the Green Glass Door is a container that holds riddles and adventures for the reader to discover, and my process for creating this work is guided by the occult principle that the power of the unseen cannot be transmitted through explanation, and that to fully understand magick one must embark upon an initiatory journey of direct experiences. Below is a preliminary sketch that I drew for book one of The Valley of the Green Glass Door, depicting the idea that if we empty the contents of our hearts we will find a hidden doorway within:

During the SHE residency this month I’ll be working on my books and further developing my research methodologies and ideas about the intersections of applied magick and quantum theory, the purpose of cultivating non-linear ways of knowing, and ritual as community care. I’m excited to have you along for the ride, so if you want to talk about non-linear time, ghosts, New Orleans lore, or anything else, you can find me here!