Eden Bloom

I’m a 50-something sound and visual artist, raising a family and striving for meaningful and respectful relationships on the land known as Waawiiyaataanong/Detroit. Biography

I was born in Detroit in 1969 and raised in the ‘burbs. When I was 11, I interrupted a suicide attempt only to have the gun turned on me. I began making art as a means to navigate that experience. Working across disciplines, I was intuitively drawing schematics, writing poems and creating spaces in which to move. I formed bands that explored these spaces throughout school and struggled with addiction. I moved out west in the 90s and began to interweave personal and political intentions with my art. Though I have taken art classes, I am self and community-taught. I returned to Detroit in 2000 and continued to struggle with addiction until meeting my partner and starting a family. Statement

My name is Eden Bloom. I finally and officially came into being last year, in 2023. I have been a creator and have made art my entire life, but I have never been able to truly claim it because it was done in my father’s name; the name I was given at birth. Last year, a judge granted my family’s request to change our names. 

The development of this page has been an act of reclaiming and realigning where my creative output is gathered and how it is identified. This is part of my healing from violence and addiction. I’m extremely grateful. 

I came from a family of psychopomps, morticians and ministers, who have supported souls in transition between realms. They dealt in transitions, in in-between spaces, and in cutting through illusions. My work strives to carry that forward into meaningful creative and political action, to break spells, to interrupt illusions.

My work has always looked like a ceremony or ritual, because it is. I work with anything that I can find and in any medium that I can get a conversation with the unseen going in or on. In the recording studio or on the stage, I play found objects, guitar and sing. I craft some sounds and songs, but the majority of my work is emergent or comes from a no-mind or gnostic state. 

I was and still am deeply influenced by the cut-up method of Brion Gysin as propagated by William S. Burroughs and the films of Kenneth Anger. Their influence has supported my manifestation of emergent powerful ceremonies that serve as both performance and practice, The conversation becomes the creation, the content.

I strive to respect influences, teachers, the people I live with, the spirits of the land we live on and the elemental forces I intuit.  My creative life has been deeply anchored in sexual desire, resistance to religious dogma and the interruption of dominant narratives. Race and place are also prominent throughout my work. Raising a ‘white’ family in the largest Black city in the US has made issues that were once distant more personal.

It is vital to note that I work and live in majority Black spaces and tend to focus on anti-Blackness. This said, I recognize and strive to move in solidarity with all those who face oppression here and globally. I’m constantly learning and attempting to develop deeper relations.

We’re living on stolen land and in the context of Detroit’s engineered resurrection, it is land being stolen and resettled again. There is frustration at the left’s ideologically selective response to injustice and there is anger over the rise of fascistic, extractive policies and perspectives. Throughout my work there is an effort to interrupt the rise of authoritarianism and confront white supremacy.

There is a powerful notion I read; “the concept of whiteness itself is a wall, violent and militarized, that exempts Europeans from the pain of yearning for their homelands.” This is powerful because it speaks some truth, but…

I went looking for the spirit of Europe
I did so in peril, I did so in vain.
I went looking for my people, my kin
I still have the scars and markings, 
but I’m not allowed back in without 
identifying with a nation state or nationalism. 

I struggle with my own identity, space and place. While being born in the city of Detroit I still struggle with the idea of being native to this place. I climbed over the wall of whiteness to find that yearning and found very little left of the spirit of Europe not tarnished with notions of supremacy.

My work is primarily targeted at those who identify as white, the communities I grew up in and those of us, like myself and my family, who have and are returning to the city. There is a call for a deeper awareness and action in the face of well-documented harm.

Most recently, a Detroit Future City report detailed the difference in life expectancy between white Detroiters at 76 years and Black Detroiters only living, on average, 68 years. The most recent census reports a decline in the Black population of Detroit by 100,000 in the past 10 years. The opportunities here are not equitable. Population loss and retention efforts in Detroit and in Michigan have been widely discussed. There are numerous efforts to try and lure new residents to the state and city.

While changes are necessary for the city and the state to increase revenue, it is imperative that we retain and support our existent Black population. My work strives to address this by increasing awareness of the impact that “taking advantage of” Detroit’s turn-around can have on long standing, predominantly Black residents. 

My current work strives to interrupt whiteness and, through deepening an awareness of local space. It strives to reconnect with the natural world without dogma or the desire to dominate it. To listen to the elemental and the lesser gods that inhabit the groves, nooks and crevasses among which we attempt to settle in. Through visual and sound meditations I strive to inspire a greater awareness of spaces in-between and those who inhabit them. “Place-making” – but for real. Intentions

It is my intention for the work I continue to create to be healing, educational and an expression of solidarity with communities who are most impacted by ongoing political and climate catastrophes. Resume Work Samples