dani alvarez Imagination Fund Recipient — Plant DNA Collage
Flower enthusiast and comic illustrator dani alvarez received a 2024 Playbook Imagination Fund grant for a digital collage mapping personal and ancestral places through plant life documented on SEINet. Places include Caguas and Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, Rotterdam, Brooklyn, Singapore, Kathmandu and Tucson.
Artist statement
For this project I would like to use the online resource SEINet to create a virtual collage and mapping of my own "DNA," based on what plants and flowers have been collected and documented at locations I have lived, and where my parents and grandparents are from. This project is inspired from a conversation I had on a walk with a botanist, where he told me that when testing the DNA of a plant, the results show not only just the plant's own genetic mapping, but also every organism that has ever come into contact with that plant. I am fascinated by the idea that all living matter is affected by everything that touches it, and also believe that every experience a person has then becomes a part of that person, and a part of their story.
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