A Living Archive of Hair
Where Ritual Roots and Identity Blooms
Tending Legacy Through the Blade & the Bloom
Hair Is The Garden We Wear is a visionary, interdisciplinary project by artist and educator Tzu Poré that reimagines hair as a living archive, ritual interface, and pedagogical tool. Rooted in ancestral wisdom and biophilic philosophy, the project explores how hair functions as a site of memory, energy exchange, and ecological intelligence—bridging cosmetology, agriculture, and symbolic art.
Through symbolic haircuts, storytelling, and embodied design, the project offers a holistic educational framework that centers Black and Indigenous knowledge systems. It draws from ancient practices where hair was used in soil enrichment, spiritual rites, and frequency registration—positioning hair not merely as aesthetic, but as a vital organ of perception and cultural transmission.
Hair Is The Garden We Wear is also the foundation for Shift/Pivot, a transformative curriculum that integrates art, healing, and systemic critique. Together, these initiatives invite institutions, communities, and collaborators to rethink education through the lens of ritual, ecology, and embodied memory.
The First Public Activation of Hair Is The Garden We Wear
Last month, I had the honor of activating Hair Is The Garden We Wear for the first time in a public setting—at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. It was a live, hour-long conversation between myself and journalist Kahn Santori Davison, moderated but alive, like the work itself.
We opened with a reflection. I introduced the metaphor that grounds everything: hair as a garden. A living archive. A sensory interface. A carrier of memory, energy, and ancestral wisdom. From there, we moved.
We talked about hair as a site of emotional and energetic exchange—how it holds touch, grief, joy, and legacy. I spoke on its role in African and Indigenous traditions, and how the scalp becomes a kind of soil. Every cut, a ceremony.
We moved into agriculture. I shared stories of how hair was used in ancient planting rituals, especially among Indigenous Black American Indian communities. Hair braided into the land. Hair as offering. Hair as signal. Body, earth, and spirit—braided too.
Then we talked about cosmetology. I unpacked the word itself—its roots in cosmos, order, ornament. I offered my view of cosmetology not as surface work, but as cosmic study. A symbolic haircut is not just aesthetic—it’s anatomical, astronomical, ancestral.
I introduced Shift/Pivot, my educational framework. It’s where symbolic design becomes curriculum. Where identity, ecology, and systemic change are taught through the blade, the mirror, the ritual. I shared examples from workshops and community sessions—how people begin to see themselves differently when the cut is intentional.
We closed with questions. I invited the audience to reflect on their own hair stories, their own ancestral threads. And I left them with a reminder that guides my practice: Giving always precedes receiving.