The Trapped Soul

Context

The transition toward electric vehicles is often framed as a necessary step toward environmental responsibility. In public discourse, the electric car appears as a symbol of progress, innovation, and moral correction. Yet the lithium-ion batteries that power these vehicles rely on cobalt mining, much of which takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo under hazardous conditions.

The Trapped Soul responds to this tension. Rather than questioning the urgency of climate action, the project asks how narratives of sustainability are constructed, and whose labour remains invisible within them.

Central Question

What does it mean to celebrate technological progress while remaining distant from the human bodies that enable it?

The Work

The installation takes the form of an interactive car showroom. Visitors configure an electric vehicle through a polished digital interface that mirrors contemporary retail platforms. As they navigate features and battery upgrades, material sourcing gradually becomes foregrounded.

Within the speculative logic of the project, the vehicle’s performance assistant is revealed not as artificial intelligence, but as the trapped soul of a Congolese miner who died during cobalt extraction. The miner is not memorialised but integrated, reframed as optimisation within the system.

Subtle glitches interrupt the interface, destabilising the showroom’s composure. At the conclusion, visitors receive a follow-up email from the miner’s soul, complicating easy moral distance and questioning how we narrate ethics from afar.

Why This Form

The showroom was chosen as a site where aspiration and authority are carefully staged through design. By embedding critique within a familiar consumer environment, the installation avoids overt confrontation and instead implicates the viewer through participation.

Rather than presenting exploitation as distant spectacle, the project positions the audience inside the supply chain, asking them to recognise how innovation and extraction coexist within the same narrative of progress.

What the Project Reveals

The Trapped Soul does not offer a simple indictment of electric vehicles. Climate mitigation remains urgent. At the same time, global supply chains absorb human labour into infrastructures that are later celebrated as clean and forward-looking.

The project reveals how sustainability can function as a stabilising story, one that foregrounds environmental benefit while obscuring the uneven distribution of risk and sacrifice. It holds in tension the necessity of transition and the bodies entangled within it.