Emily Bass: The Dendron Project | Creative Capital Project

Learn more about The Dendron Project, by artist Emily Bass, Creative Capital Grantee 2023.

The Dendron Project uses narrative, visual art, historical research, and embodied exploration to (re)claim connections with immune systems and processes that have, under SARS-CoV-2, mpox, and HIV/AIDS, been flattened and co-opted by a capitalist discourse (how many shots? how many drugs? how much immunity and for how long?) and necropolitics (who gets vaccines, tests and treatments? who lives and who dies?). The Dendron Project, which takes its name from the Greek word for tree, is rooted in community-based activist models for collective action around health and disease, including feminist health collectives, AIDS-treatment literacy, and present patient-led movements for health justice focused on long COVID and associated diseases. These models and movements locate expertise within the body, situate scientific information within historical contexts and lived experience, and embrace intimate, creative, context-specific modes of communication. The Dendron Project is activated by the dendritic cell, a potent originator of immune responses distinguished by nonlinear, exploratory motion to locate threats that it carries into immunologic community without dismantling. The Dendron Project includes a Text/Book, Laboratory, and Data Set. The Text/Book is an intimate biography of the dendritic cell that encompasses scientific, historical, and autobiographical events in a dendritically exploratory narrative centered on the immunologic discoveries and concurrent histories that led to the cells discovery. The Laboratory is a virtual and physical space for immune responses through conversation, writing, gesture, collage and other media. Collage echoes the production of immunity (and vice versa), in its meaning-making from selected components of found material. The Dataset will be an online repository of images generated by the Lab and located in the course of research for the Text/Book. Read more: https://creative-capital.org/projects...

This video was originally presented at the 2023 Creative Capital Carnival—an artist gathering for discovering grantee projects-in-progress, meeting with industry experts, building community, and celebrating artists.

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