Yidan Li

United States–based Yidan Li holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental design from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree in critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices in architecture from Columbia University. She is interested in the aesthetics of (post)modernity, the politics of art and architecture, decolonialism and postcolonialism, and practices and methodologies in interdisciplinary research.

During her residency at Est-Nord-Est, Li adopted an observer’s stance. Sensitive to space and the role it can play, she analyzed the way in which architecture influences work, channels social connections, orients movements, and stimulates the construction of time. For instance, even as she participated actively, she scrutinized the comings and goings of the artists in residency as they circulated through the artists’ centre, between the common spaces and their studios, and between the beach and the centre. She noted how group meals fostered social relations and cohesion among the group’s members and then studied their exchanges when they shared books and ideas. She also kept track of when artists withdrew to concentrate on their individual production, as well as when they interacted with the Est-Nord-Est ecosystem, such as when they worked in the technical workshops.

From these observations, Li designed her own mental map. Interested in the visualization of data, she made a shelter with a transparent curtain, on which ideas were charted out through handwritten notes and photographs taken on site; these elements were then linked to each other by strings, weaving a network of ideas and thoughts. This mental schema was also sprinkled with materials collected on the shore in the company of other artists. “This is my brain,” she told me, and during the open-door days she invited the public to enter this physical representation of her thoughts. For this installation, she rethought ideas about language and translation, as her visual writing called, by its very existence, upon a new mode of reading.