Rubber Dreams of its Lifetime

Application summary

This artistic research project aims to unmask rubber as a commodity fetish and a fetish commodity, illuminating global tensions between production and consumption. Over a 2-year period, we aim to develop the project from in-depth research to an interdisciplinary exhibition to be held in the UK and Finland. The project will involve working with smallholder farmers and local latex fetishists in Southeast Asia (SEA) to create a body of literary, photographic and moving image work narrativising the curious interface of material reality and immaterial fantasy. It is our conviction that an abstruse and challenging subject like this can only be accessed indirectly through art that offers unexpected interpretive potentials and takes into account neglected or excluded narratives. Through our work with smallholders, we aim to highlight the global urgency of a just transition in the context of postcolonial environmental politics. We will also create art that features SEA rubber fetishists because their subject position as descendents of the colonial legacy of rubber production, as well as their queer relationship with rubber, have the potential to disrupt conventional understandings of the material and its history. The juxtaposition of these two strands of artistic research will provide new insights into the political economy of desire and invite an international audience to situate themselves within it.