Date: Saturday 19 April
Time: 16:30 - 18:30 workshop with Yi Zhang
18:30 - 19:00 food & drinks
19:00 - 21:00 screening & conversation with Bo Wang
Location: Varia, Gouwstraat 3
Participation: for the workshop is limited, to attend both the workshop & the screening please write an email to info@varia.zone with [Hair as Commodity] in the title

During this Colonial Infrastructures worksession we will continue to investigate systems of commodity, processes of labour and assembly, and global import-export relationships through the intimate object of hair.

With artist Yi Zhang, the ‘Hair Recycling Workshop’ invites the participants to reimagine the afterlife of discarded hair in urban waste systems through a participatory and sensory experience of observing, smelling, touching, and making with hair. The workshop begins with sensory and guided meditation reflecting on the cycle of hair’s life cycle and its entanglement with the urban ecosystem. Followed by the hands-on workshop of transforming it into fabric through a wet felting method, along with conversation and reflection.

After a break with food and drink, we will watch the film ‘An Asian Ghost Story’, by Bo Wang, that tells haunting stories of modernisation in Asia through a close reading of the hair industry and how the ‘Communist Hair Ban’ embargo influenced the export oriented economy since the Cold War. Wang’s work explores Hong Kong as “a transient space that mediates and sanitises the connection between different worlds, and the relationship between U.S. Imperialism and East Asia order in the Cold War era”.

Content Warning: The workshop involves hands-on interaction with human hair sourced from hair salons.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own human or animal hair, or fibers found from their household.
For further reading see: https://yizhang.xyz/Hair-Recycling-Workshop

Visitors are invited to attend both the workshop and screening, or simply join from 18:30 for some food and film watching.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA, Garage Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, LUX & Open City Documentary Festival, Seoul Mediacity Biennale & DMZ Docs, and Sharjah Film Platform, among others. He is a recipient of major international awards, including New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, O.F.F. Prize at Sesc_Videobrasil, Best Doc Short at Sharjah Film Platform, etc. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at the Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018, as well as at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016. He is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, and currently teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University.

Yi Zhang (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Eindhoven, working across video, installation, writing, and performance. Their research explores the entangled influences of human trade on urban ecosystems, the migration experiences of human and non-human beings, and their displacement under capitalist systems. Through speculative fabulation, Yi reimagines ecological relationships and material afterlives, questioning structures of separation and extraction in modernity. They engage with low-cost, low-tech, and self-organized methods to sustain alternative economies and experiment with community-based, distributed knowledge.

This series falls under Varia’s Counter Coloniality research thread and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.