Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime is an ongoing research-based art project by Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen, funded by Kone Foundation, exploring rubber as a commodity fetish and a fetish commodity. As its starting point, Rubber Dreams homes in on this dualism in Southeast Asia, where most of the global supply of natural rubber is produced, and where rubber fetishism is quickly growing in popularity. At the same time, our research has stretched beyond rubber’s artificial homeland and extended towards other regions within its elastic embrace.

Grounded in the present that is an accumulation of the past, Rubber Dreams focuses on people across the rubber value chain, from smallholders to tire shop employees, factory workers to latex fetishists. It turns rubber into a prism refracting these seemingly disparate human experiences that have been shaped by the material since its introduction to Southeast Asia as a colonial plantation crop. Through it, we explore the interconnections, entanglements and metamorphic sublimities between the political economy of agricultural commodities; local and global histories of the plantation system; the ecology of monoculture rubber and agroforestry/other polyculture approaches as an alternative; and the transformative potentials, magic and material constraints of fetishishism.

The artistic outputs of this project synthesise empirical & archival research with poetic approaches, seeking a path beyond binaristic assumptions. This multi-disciplinary constellation will include the documentary-fantasy film ‘Heveaphilia’, moving image works, photographic objects, creative non-fiction, performances, workshops and installations. With each iteration of Rubber Dreams, our intention is to translate the expansive tangle of rubber’s lifetime into curated forms of presentation specific to the venue and context of its exhibition, including the making of new works, installations, literature and events.
If you are interested in Rubber Dreams and its creative outputs, please drop an email to bartseng@gmail.com ~~~