"The Yabi.Deh Project," which is based on an interactive map that I started to develop in late 2023, showcases the relevant art keywords from different locations around the world, leading to answer the question of: where would my art be the most welcomed as an inquiry in our field as a cultural producer. The work's title is a diminutive of my mother's name, reminiscent of simple commercial technocratic quips such as Uber, Temu, Didi, Yelp and, in our case, Yabi - short for Yabideh. It is meant to be a testament to the resilience of her immigration journey, as my parents are both refugee from Cambodia.
The project is a response to Le Labo Media Art Center's commission under the theme, in French, of "la jachère" which translates into a land that is left to be uncultivated or fallow akin to a reflection on the pastorale but in its digital version on how one could cultivate the digital to bear a bountiful crop so to speak. The tool selected was web-scraping, coded in Python, as if one would metaphorically farm a digital land. The methodology underpinning this project aims to quantify the number of times a keyword-related medium, such as painting, sculpture, photography, etc., to an artistic medium is mentioned on a website and categorize it per city, country, and region.
The act of digital farming is inspired by Hans Haake's work titled World Poll, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, where he used a survey of the demographic of the attendants to produce a series of inquiries of the events while echoing Coco Fusco's opinion article published in Hyperallergic in the summer of 2023, "Affirmative Action and the Art World's Elites," the project is also a setup to the question "who are we making art for?" as the data gathered by web-scrapping is essentially trying to address a brief portrait of the art world per region as a bank of knowledge to elaborate on curated advice for artists.
The project itself aims to alleviate the lack of professional resources and opportunities for marginalized and under-represented artists who struggle and need help finding their footing within the art world. The research pertains to visual art through a multidisciplinary perspective. It aims to produce an interactive representation for creatives that would help them in their career, allowing them to spend more time on community building, their artwork, and self-care.