Subbi · The human provenance layer
Provenance tells us where a work came from. The human layer tells us why it exists: the hands, the memories, and the rituals behind it, carried for the object's lifetime.
Subbi presents · Inaugural exhibition
A journey through space and time, memory and material, following the objects we carry, the stories they hold, and the invisible threads that lead us home.
Where Subbi began
One my grandmother used to wear, from North Karnataka, India. Whenever I visited her, my favorite thing was to dress up in her saris and try to walk as elegantly as she did. My family would laugh and call me Subbi, a word of endearment in our dialect for someone playful, dramatic, and mischievous.
After she passed, the sari led me to India, where I spent months with the handloom weavers behind it. I found generations of knowledge, gestures, relationships, and histories: a living archive of the invisible things that give an object its true value. I came to call it the Human Layer.
The threads kept pulling, through Argentina and Brazil and back to New York. HOME gathers what returned with me.
Reisha Savadatti, Founder & Curator
Read the full story →
The human layer
The living record of why a work exists: its inspiration, intention, process, and authorship.
We call it intimate provenance. Traditional provenance proves where something came from. Intimate provenance remembers why it matters.
Behind every piece, Subbi curates a mixed-media archive, authored by the artist.
What Subbi is
Subbi is a digital archive of the people, materials, techniques, cultural histories, and memories behind physical works. A library keeps books so knowledge outlives the people who wrote it. Subbi keeps the human stories behind objects so they outlive the people who made and loved them.
Thousands of craft communities around the world are at the risk of disappearing within a generation or two.
We learn from indigenous craft communities, not only to preserve the worlds that live behind their objects, but to guide the future of human creativity. Their wisdom becomes a model for every artist who needs a more intimate provenance in the age of AI.
The object
Written first by the hands that made it: intention, process, ritual, and the place it comes from.
Your collection
Collect a piece and it joins your personal library, with its full archive, ready to pass on.
From the exhibition
One-of-one works by artists met along the threads from India to Argentina, Brazil, and New York. Each piece carries its own human layer.
Why now
In the age of AI, anything can be produced. Objects will always be able to prove where they came from. Far fewer will be able to show why they matter. We begin with art, and build toward fashion, craft, heirlooms, and every object whose meaning goes beyond its materials.
Subbi makes meaning portable.
Opening night · November 5 · 46 Bridge Street, DUMBO
How it works
A secure NFC chip lives inside every Subbi-activated object, set beneath the surface at the point of making. No app, no login — hold a phone near the piece and its archive opens.
01 — Tap
Hold any NFC phone near the chip embedded in the piece. No search, no download — the archive opens in the browser instantly.
02 — Unlock
The curated archive appears: maker, provenance, ritual, cultural context, and every owner since the piece left the studio.
03 — Collect
Buy a piece and it enters your personal library. Add a photo, a note, or the reason you chose it — your chapter, permanently attached.
Subbi runs entirely in the browser your phone already has. The archive is built once, at the point of making, and lasts as long as the object does.
Try it on a piece →Priya Nagappa · Mixed media on panel · 2026 · One of one
View maker profile →$4,200
2–3% of every future resale returns to the maker, automatically.
Panel dimensions 40cm × 52cm · Ships insured, worldwide · Chip embedded beneath the lower-left corner
The living archive
Memory — expanded
A mixed-media archive: a scanned letter from the studio, a process photo mid-firing, and a recorded voice note from Priya — captured once and carried with the piece for its lifetime.
Your chapter — owner only, unlocks on purchase
More makers in "Home"
Browse all 24 →Maker profile
São Paulo, Brazil
Their pieces
More makers
Browse all 24 →
presents
A journey through space and time, memory and material—following the objects we carry, the stories they hold, and the invisible threads that lead us home.
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Our story
The sari
Growing up in California, whenever I got to spend time with my grandmother overseas, my favorite thing to do was dress up in her saris. She would indulge me, folding one in half to wrap around my small body and slipping her heavy bangles onto my wrists, amusing herself as I tried to stand and walk around as elegantly as she did every day.
My family would laugh and call me Subbi, a word of endearment in our North Karnataka dialect for someone playful, dramatic, and mischievous. The nickname has followed me ever since.
She showed her love through her hands, cooking everything from scratch, tending her garden, sewing, and massaging us from head to toe. She was the first to teach me how to sew, garden, make games out of things in the kitchen, and draw rangoli. She was also an incredible storyteller, and the only one in my family who didn’t speak English, so I learned Kannada, our mother tongue, to speak with her.
And after she passed, somehow, the sari totally gripped me.
The weavers
First, after graduating in 2023, it took me to India, where I spent four months tracing the handloom weavers behind her saris, carrying her memory with me and a vision for a clothing line made from the textiles I had loved growing up.
I began at Charaka, a women-led handloom cooperative in South Karnataka and one of the largest in the country, where I spent a couple of months learning from its artisans, translating their stories, and studying under handloom activist and theatre director Prasanna, who became my mentor. A pioneer of India’s handloom revival, Prasanna had gathered an extensive library at the ashram where I stayed, and I spent days scouring its pages. But the books could hardly do justice to what I was experiencing firsthand, learning from the people practicing these crafts with all five senses.
For thousands of years, the world wore Indian cloth, from the Roman Empire to China and the coasts of Africa. When the British arrived, India’s handloom industry became one of their targets. The charkha, the hand-spinning wheel, and the women who sat before it spinning cotton, became symbols of resistance.
I began to understand that one of the pillars of our postcolonial reality is that the story itself has been tampered with. The books could tell me about the textiles, but there was an entire world of knowledge, history, and human experience that I could only begin to understand by being there, learning directly from the people whose hands still practiced these traditions.
Further north, in Ilkal, where her saris came from, the weavers spoke the dialect of Kannada she had given me. One of the weavers told me something that stopped me in my tracks. Long before anyone had imagined a computer, weaving was already operating on a system of binary logic. Every thread lifted or lowered, every crossing of warp and weft, followed a sequence of instructions that produced a pattern. The very principles behind modern computing had existed in the hands of weavers for thousands of years.
After going to a few different towns, we only found a handful of homes still doing this specific craft in the original sustainable way. The houses were very small and the handloom took up most of the space of the house. A family of four or more would live their entire life in the narrow spaces between the handloom and the walls. And every single one of these homes, before we left, insisted on serving us a homemade chai or lemonade (sharbat). It was not an option. Both of these drinks tasted exactly the way my grandma had made them, a taste I had not found anywhere else in India or the world.
I had come looking for fabric. There, I came face to face with an entire world behind this craft: generations of knowledge, gestures, relationships, and histories that embraced me with a strange familiarity, like home.
What I encountered there was something I could only understand as a Human Layer: a living archive of the seemingly invisible things that give an object its true value.
The threads
I had already begun cutting brown-paper patterns for the clothing line when a parasite abruptly sent me back to California.
Over the next eight months, as I recovered and worked across PR, marketing, sales, and luxury fashion in New York, something began to bother me. The communities whose knowledge I had witnessed firsthand were rarely valued for what they contributed, and even the fashion brands working with them with the greatest integrity struggled to survive.
Years later, when a friend asked me to recommend books on India’s textiles and crafts, I struggled to name more than a few. It struck me that entire worlds of knowledge, accumulated over generations, had barely made it onto the page. And what had been recorded was not always told by the people who held that knowledge themselves.
Later, I learned that thousands of Indigenous craft communities around the world are at risk of disappearing within the coming generations. Suddenly, it felt like thousands of saris were pulling at me from every corner of the earth.
Between the worlds of venture capital, art, and emerging technology, the beginnings of an answer started to take shape. In 2025, Draper Startup House NYC awarded me a scholarship for the first iteration of Subbi, a technology platform focused on provenance in fashion.
But the idea of an object as a library is hardly new. There’s a reason the word text is in textile. Indigenous craft communities around the world have long woven their histories, beliefs, relationships, and ways of life into the things they make. In today’s world, we’ve lost sight of this, coming to see these objects as commodities rather than the repositories of knowledge they are.
I began to see in these traditions not just something worth preserving, but a way forward. And in a world increasingly shaped by technology and AI, contemporary artists were confronting many of the same questions about the value of human creation. Their work belonged in conversation with these traditions, where each could be valued on its own terms and in relation to the other, while the people, techniques, memories, and histories behind each piece were recorded.
That conviction became HOME.
I kept following the threads, and this year, they took me through Argentina and Brazil, where I spent months tracing the Human Layer through the artists, places, and things that echoed this sense of home.
In Buenos Aires, the city’s art scene drew me in. It became a cocoon for the world I had been slowly cultivating, and its people inspired me with their passion. They welcomed me and made a home for me at a very odd time in my life. It felt good, too, to revive my dormant Spanish, which had surrounded me growing up in California and going to college in New York. The exhibition I had begun shaping in New York continued to grow there, through conversations with artists exploring the same questions of memory, material, and identity.
In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, through my friends, I found an art community already far ahead in bringing traditional craftsmanship, Indigenous knowledge, and contemporary practice into conversation. Within just two weeks, artists had committed to the exhibition, contributed their works, and sat down for interviews for my podcast, The Human Layer.
Brazil embraced me before I could even grasp what was happening. The artists and I were so eager to speak to each other, even without a shared language, and I felt my grandmother’s presence every time I stumbled through Portuguese or Spanish in an interview, searching for the right words so we could understand each other. Once again, language wasn’t a barrier, but a test of heart. There was freshly squeezed sugarcane juice next door every morning, and artists opening their studios and homes to me with a generosity that reminded me of Karnataka. As a child, I had visited the sugarcane fields my ancestors once harvested in India. Years later, on another continent, I found my way back to them.
During a photoshoot in São Paulo, for the first time, we had to drape a sari without another Indian woman there to help us. We spent nearly an hour on FaceTime with my mother trying to get the pleats right, something she can do in three minutes. Every fold, every pleat, the tension of the fabric, where to hold it and where to let it fall — at times it felt like we needed at least three pairs of hands. And yet, for so many women, all of this knowledge lives intuitively in their hands and bodies.
Now, those same threads have led me back to New York. Looking at all the pieces that have returned with me, I realize they form a kind of tapestry of this journey and of everyone who became part of it. That tapestry is HOME, Subbi’s first exhibition.
What began as a search for my grandmother’s saris has become something much larger: a living library of human craftsmanship, preserving not just the objects we make, but the people, relationships, and worlds of knowledge that make them possible.
What Subbi is
A library for human hands. We call it intimate provenance.
Every object has a story, sometimes more than one. Help these stories find their home.
Come HOME →The team
Founder & Curator
Reisha Savadatti grew up in the Bay Area, California, the daughter of two Indian immigrant engineers, one in hardware and one in software. She moved to New York in 2018 to study Public Policy at NYU, found an unlikely antidote to her chronic migraines in acting, and transferred to Tisch School of the Arts. She graduated in 2023 with a BFA in Drama and a minor in Public Policy, working in costume design and styling along the way.
Her path has never been a straight line. She has worked across PR, marketing, sales, and luxury fashion in New York, behind the scenes on the reality show Meet the Drapers, and as a community coordinator and curator for OMBRUJA, a Web3 art and culture platform. She has also written copy and blogs for biotech and education startups in the Bay Area and served as a paralegal in immigration and startup law.
From 2023 into early 2024, she studied handloom weaving in India at Charaka under theatre director and handloom activist Prasanna, who became her mentor. In 2024, she appeared at the Robert Moss Theatre on Astor Place in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, portraying Mary Magdalene, St. Thomas, and Matthias of Galilee, while also serving as costume designer for the cast. Later in 2024, she organized and moderated the Chopra Foundation’s first Gen Z panel on mental health and bridging generational gaps at its Sages & Scientists Symposium at Harvard. In 2025, Draper Startup House NYC awarded her a scholarship for the first iteration of Subbi.
For HOME, she curated the exhibition across India, Argentina, Brazil, and New York, and recorded interviews for her forthcoming podcast, The Human Layer.
She continues to write plays and keeps a door open to acting, both ongoing explorations of her creative roots that she gladly returns to when the right project comes along. Most recently, a short film she starred in during college was selected for a film festival in São Paulo, the same summer she traveled there for Subbi.
Outside of Subbi, she continues to explore her creative interests through art, clothing design, acting, and writing, and rarely turns down an opportunity to spend time with animals.
Technology Lead
Jayashree Ujjankop is a software professional, born and raised in Belgaum, Karnataka, India. She came to the United States in the 1990s with an engineering degree and went on to earn her master’s at San José State University. Over the past 25 years she has built and launched web and mobile products, finding in technology a new home for her creativity.
Long before that in her childhood, she tried nearly every art form within reach: drawing, painting, embroidery, sewing, pottery, and macramé. Now, through her daughters, she is rediscovering art, which feels like a full-circle moment.
She loves what AI makes possible, and believes the future should still feel human. She built the Subbi website for HOME, helping give the stories behind each work a home online.
She enjoys practicing yoga and, in her free time, loves making homemade Ayurvedic-inspired recipes and hair oils.
Cinematographer & Editor
Christina Yīzhōu Yú is a director, cinematographer and editor based in New York and Shanghai. Working across short documentary, short film and music videos, she is drawn to the people behind creative work and the places, languages and histories that shape them.
Having grown up and lived across Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cologne, Vancouver and New York, and speaking Mandarin, English and French, Christina moves easily between cultures, a perspective that informs how she listens to and frames the people she films.
She holds a BA in Journalism and Media Studies with a minor in French from Rutgers University–New Brunswick, where her work in media production was selected as outstanding student work, marking the start of her documentary practice. Before turning fully to film, she worked in PR and marketing, including with an agency for Tiffany & Co., where she contributed to the brand’s About Love campaign with Beyoncé and JAY-Z.
Alongside film, Christina is a jewelry and bag designer, working by hand in silver and metal. Knowing the making process firsthand shapes how she understands, and films, the work of other artists.
She is currently directing a short documentary for NOWNESS Asia, now in development. She also works on music videos and independent short films in New York, supporting productions from development and on-set production to behind-the-scenes and social media content.
For HOME, Christina edited Subbi’s The Human Layer podcast series and filmed and edited most of the documentary-style content surrounding Subbi, including the exhibition teaser. Working with footage Reisha captured throughout her travels, she helps bring the people, places, and stories behind the project to life. For Christina, home has never been one place. She belongs nowhere in particular, and somehow everywhere at once.
Communication and Social Media Strategy
Davide Bonini is a creative director and communication strategist, as well as the founder of Video Bullet and part of the creative collective God Save the Chill. His work combines strategic thinking, storytelling, and visual direction to help projects build meaningful and contemporary communication. For this exhibition, he collaborated on the event’s communication strategy, contributing to its positioning and narrative development.
Music Architect
Bilaal Avaz is a self taught Pakistani-American artist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. He started his career as an actor at the age of 16 after being signed to Take 3 Talent Agency in New York. He shortly after booked his first role on season 19 of Law & Order: SVU and quickly amassed professional credits including several independent films, a leading role in an MTV award-winning Brazilian series, multiple superbowl commercials, television series' and voiceovers for Spotify and Marvel. In 2019, Bilaal was admitted to NYU Tisch School of the Arts on a full academic scholarship where he studied Drama. Despite the lack of resources, guidance and precedent for the arts in his community, Bilaal went on to be featured as a finalist in Season 18 of ABC’s American Idol – the first Pakistani finalist in the show’s 20-year history. Additional credits include FBI: Most Wanted, Netflix's Girls5Eva, Bhangin' It's world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, and the pre-Broadway production of Prince's Purple Rain.
In 2023, Bilaal started his career as a record producer after producing "Zalmi Raalal" -- the official Pakistan Super League anthem for the 2023 season -- alongside award-winning British-Pakistani producer Naughty Boy. Additional producing credits include Sound Direction and Executive Music Producer for TCL's World Cup Campaign as well as the 2025 Peshawar Zalmi PSL anthem
Exhibition Installation Lead
Ana León Nunez is an actor and visual artist with 5+ years of experience in gallery and assistant work here in NY, specifically working with artists and galleries in the Chinatown/Lower East Side/Tribeca area. She has worked at Carriage Trade NY, a non-profit gallery in Chinatown, where she has managed over 18 exhibitions from start to finish. She also works alongside artist Antoni Muntadas and his team across Europe and Asia on projects. She can also be found performing at Speakeasy Magick in Manhattan most nights of the week.
Strategic Advisor
Freddy Leiva is an art and fossil dealer, advisor, curator, and artist based in New York. Born in the Bronx in 1992 to a Nicaraguan family, he grew up between Managua and the Bronx, and studied at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where his concentration was “Shaping Culture Through Persuasion.”
Before the art world, he managed Michelin-starred restaurants. He went on to spend seven years as studio manager to the American painter Donald Baechler, working alongside him until the artist’s death in 2022.
Today he moves between contemporary art and natural history, a range that has earned him the nickname “the dinosaur dealer.” He brokered the partnership between New York gallery Amanita and Tucson’s Granada Gallery, and has been involved in the sale of a Triceratops. He is also a founding team member at Co-Museum, a Singapore-based art and technology company, where he leads partnerships.
As an artist, Freddy draws on the native art of ancient civilizations and prehistoric origin myths, working between drawing, painting, and paper sculpture. His work has been shown with Galería Leyendecker at ARCO and Estampa in Madrid, with Cellar Contemporary at Arte Fiera in Bologna, and in a solo exhibition at Memento Gallery in Atlanta.
For Subbi, he advises on strategy, partnerships, and the art market.
Gallery Director and Exhibition Partner
Frederic Brehm is a Brooklyn-based director, creative producer, and co-founder of Special Operations, a multidisciplinary creative studio working across film, art, technology, and immersive experiences.
Over the past two decades, his work has brought him into collaboration with artists, musicians, filmmakers, and technologists, producing everything from documentary films and music videos to large-scale installations and experimental experiences.
His interest in bringing together people, ideas, and disciplines extends to Electric Avenue Gallery. With a dedicated gallery in Baltimore and an exhibition space operating out of Special Operations’ Brooklyn studio, Electric Avenue serves as a platform for artists and creative experimentation, reflecting his belief that some of the most interesting work happens when different worlds collide.
PR & Strategic Advisor
Amy Stambaugh is a writer, wine snob, and actor based between Buenos Aires and New York City. She has traveled to over thirty countries and champions the underdog.
DJ, Producer & Sound Designer
Richard is a New York–based DJ, producer, and sound designer whose approach to electronic music is rooted in precision, groove, and understated energy. Raised in Queens, New York, he developed an eclectic musical foundation shaped by the city’s rich cultural landscape, drawing inspiration from the rhythms of ’90s hip-hop, jazz, funk, and salsa alongside the evolving sounds of house and techno.
Favoring stripped-back minimal house and deep, hypnotic techno, Richard crafts sets and productions that emphasize subtle movement, texture, and atmosphere.
An avid record collector for over 15 years now, Richard has played at some of New York’s most world renowned parties such as Resolute, Golden Record and Apollo Studio, having held residencies for the latter two. Beyond New York he’s played at institutions such as Club Der Visionaire in Berlin, Club Video in Bogota, and Condesa in Asuncion to name a few.
Currently based in his hometown New York City, Richard continues to leave his imprint as both a curator and DJ. His focus, while currently fixated on launching a record label, remains the same: creating immersive experiences that celebrate rhythm, restraint, and timeless groove.
Business Strategy Advisor
Shashi Shashidhar is an artist, technology entrepreneur, and business strategist with over three decades of experience spanning management consulting, digital transformation, and technology innovation. His career includes leadership roles at Accenture, Centific, and Capgemini Invent, with business strategy engagements involving global brands such as Tiffany & Co. and lululemon.
He is also the co-founder of RIFFIT, an AI-powered music technology company, reflecting his longstanding interest in applying emerging technologies to creative expression. Beyond his work in technology, Shashi has been actively involved in the arts as an educator and arts commissioner.
As Business Strategy Advisor to Subbi, he brings together his expertise in business development, emerging technology, and the arts to help shape the company’s vision for preserving and celebrating human creativity.
Strategic Advisor
Born and raised in Myanmar, Bruce moved to California in 1979 and later earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from San José State University. Over the past four decades, he has built a distinguished career in the computer and high-technology industries, holding leadership roles at companies including Sun Microsystems, Celestica, Apple, Avid Technology, Symbotic, Polycom, and Equus.
Today, Bruce serves as General Manager of Segment Operations at Celestica, where he leads operations supporting hyperscale and enterprise customers. He is also the founder of Aeon9, an investment and strategic advisory firm supporting entrepreneurs and growing businesses across Southeast Asia through investment, mentorship, and hands-on guidance. Throughout his career, he has remained grounded in a belief that strong relationships, continuous learning, and meaningful impact are just as important as professional success.
Having traveled extensively around the world, Bruce values the perspectives gained from experiencing different cultures and believes there is always something new to learn. Sports have also been a lifelong passion—first as a player and fan, and more recently as an investor and supporter of opportunities within the sports industry.
For the past 30 years, Bruce has centered his life around three core priorities: maintaining his health, using his time and energy with purpose, and giving back to society, particularly to his motherland, Myanmar. He is deeply committed to supporting people, communities, and initiatives that create lasting positive impact.
Outside of work, Bruce enjoys reading, music, coaching, and sports. He approaches each day with a focus on being positive, purposeful, and impactful, while appreciating the value of living fully in every moment.
Special thanks to