Shiyu Lei
About
Shiyu Lei is a digital media artist and multidisciplinary designer. Her work spans participatory design, speculative design, and installation.
In the RCA studying year, her practice emerges from post-anthropology and embodied political ecology, positioning humus—the living, metabolic layer of soil— as a mediator of ecological democracy and a co-author of civic futures.
The Project Parliament of Things: Soil and Public, Materializing Bruno Latour’s ‘Parliament of Things’, stages multispecies assemblies where microbial carbon flows and human communities co-deliberate. Modular installations embed sensors that visualise soil vitality/ agency, while participatory workshops employ embodied learning and role-play to decentralise anthropocentrism, recasting soil as a soil-maker within ecological webs. Merging Latour’s Actor-Network Theory with Donna Haraway’s “compost ethics,” the work prototypes rituals such as carbon-ledger systems, spatializing nonhuman agency as a form of political praxis. Here, democracy transcends human exceptionalism: soil becomes both interlocutor and infrastructure, challenging modernity’s binaries by asking—what protocols emerge when soil communicates?
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