I’m a writer, creator, dancer, and Assistant Professor of English and Latina/x/o Studies at University of Iowa. I research and write about activism, performance, and creativity. I write scholarship on art activism and social movements, migration, archives, art criticism, and urban design and it’s relationship to race. I teach courses on multiethnic U.S. and hemispheric literatures (especially African American and Latinx), queer theory, performance, and women of color feminism, but also on topics that spark joy, such as gardening and coffee. As an artist,
I believe we best understand our world through embodied practice and engagement. Influenced by Cherríe Moraga’s theory in the flesh, I let my observations of the world be guided by my intuition and personal experience:
“A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives- our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings–all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity.”
As a scholar and writer, I embed my experiences as a queer, latinx, feminist into my critical perspectives and engage my thinking with movement and embodied knowing.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work delves into mysterious and unanswerable questions both personal and universal, with topics ranging from dark matter to autoimmune disease, from seed dormancy to experiences of non-identity. I embrace a multifaceted queer approach that is both mixed-media and mixed-method in order to seek unexpected connections between materials. My practice unlearns my training as an archival researcher, so that ideas emerge from a place of unknowability and of intimate contact with ephemera.
As a mother and lifelong carrier of autoimmune diseases, my body maintains an nonconsensual relationship with the history of medicine. My work excavates how the disciplinary structure of health and disease determines how we come to know our bodies as fragmented, machine-like systems. Materials such as transparencies, parafilm, pre-wrap, and the encyclopedic container of the textbook hold intimate and unruly content, forming a counternarrative to ideas of wellness grounded in white supremacy. By intersecting personal narrative with representations of anatomy art, I disrupt the visual framework determining our view of our bodies with the hope of inspire new perspectives on the event of our aliveness.
Even though my work engages with archives of Western medicine and contemporary issues in science, I draw from ritualistic practices from my personal family history with curanderismo and how that work has been translated in diaspora. Through performance, I enact and re-enact the adaptation of rituals, leaning into the chaos of materials used for wellness. The writing at the center of my practice focuses on translation and mis-translation, not only between words, but between ideas and beliefs across continents. I often sign my work as Eli Sero, which fits better on a colophon.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder 