Hair Recycling Workshop, 2024
It may seem simple to throw hair in the trash bin, but it doesn't just disappear. Hair takes years to decompose, its long-term presence in landfills and waste streams takes up a lot of space. Runoff from these landfills can gradually increase nitrogen levels in water bodies, Chemicals in hair care products can damage coral reefs, and human hair treated with bleach or chemicals can leach out these substances during degradation. Discarded human hair in urban environments is suspected to be a major cause of foot mutilation in pigeons.
This workshop invites participants to reimagine the afterlife of discarded hair in urban waste systems. Through a participatory, sensory experience of observing, touching, smelling, and making with hair. The session begins with a guided meditation that traces the journey of discarded hair, to rethink the separation between human and non-human entities, and explore how daily waste can be part of a larger process of ecological repair and cyclical regeneration.
Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of separability, this workshop will reflect on how urban waste systems enforce a division between living and non-living, human and non-human, and how these artificial separations reinforce emotional detachment from discarded materials. By treating waste, like human hair, as separate and irrelevant, the entanglements between organisms, ecosystems, and human activities became overlooked. How does urban infrastructure dictate what is deemed "acceptable" to touch and engage with, and what is kept at a distance or ignored? What materials are we encouraged to form emotional connections with, and what are we conditioned to discard as irrelevant?
Workshop include:
Sensory&Guided Meditation(35 mins): Reflect on hair’s life cycle and entanglements with urban ecosystems.
Hands-on Making&conversation(40 mins): Through sustainable, home-based, low cost, low tech recycling methods. like wet felting to transform collected hair into fabric. Participants are encouraged to bring hair (human or animal) or fibers from laundry machines.
TRIGGER WARNING: The workshop involves hands-on interaction with human hair sourced from hair salons.