A Case Study of Bloodletting (2019) comprises an eerily meditative essay film and a series of partly organic sculptural works. The project examines the poetics of excess and abjection at the body’s porous boundaries—through the act of bloodletting, or ciluo, a therapeutic procedure in traditional Chinese medicine. The Chinese character for “blood” (血) is composed of 丿 and 皿, resembling a needle piercing the body as a vessel. 

The film follows Doctor L, a practitioner of bloodletting who archives each of her cases privately. Her assistant records in close-up: droplets, clots, and streams of blood seeping from punctured skin—an anonymous, fleshy archive without faces. Imitating her assistant, Dakota also aimed her camera at the effective unit of bloodletting: a needle (pierces through) skin (seeping / flowing / leaking) blood. A “gestural prick” forms - once a gesture enters the category of symbols, it will be rewritten in the organic and spectral chain of substitution. The task is obvious: to suspend bloodletting, that is, to “bleed” bloodletting.