Yi Zhang’s sensory experience begins with a guided meditation tracing the journey of discarded hair, inviting participants to reconsider the boundaries between the human and the non-human and to explore how everyday waste might contribute to broader cycles of ecological restoration and regeneration. Participants are introduced to accessible and low-cost recycling techniques such as wet felting, through which collected hair — sourced from hair salons, animal grooming salons, or brought in by participants themselves — is transformed into new material forms. Throughout the process, sight, touch, and smell are actively engaged, while participants are encouraged to work directly with hair as a material.

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The artist approaches hair as a sensory and symbolic medium through which to investigate human impact within urban environments from a more-than-human perspective. Her workshop invites participants to reimagine the afterlife of discarded hair within urban waste systems, building on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of separability. In this context, separation is not merely about distinguishing between things, but about creating hierarchies in which certain elements are treated as fundamentally different and unequal. Urban waste systems fulfil this role by maintaining divisions between the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human, thereby shaping our emotional distance from discarded materials by framing them as insignificant. At the same time, the interconnections between organisms, ecosystems, and human activity are often overlooked. This raises questions about how urban infrastructures determine what we are allowed to touch, approach, or ignore, and how these systems shape the materials to which we become attached versus those we learn to discard.