Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen have developed a years-long investigation into rubber. After an initial focus on Southeast Asia (where most natural rubber is produced), the two artists and researchers expanded to other regions within its elastic embrace: rubber was central to European industrial expansion in the colonial era, most notably in the Congo under Belgian rule, with a legacy of violence and exploitation still felt today. The pair approach rubber as a commodity shaped by colonial extraction and a material invested with desire, imagination, and intimacy in contemporary fetish practice.

Now, they present two workshops that delve into the history of rubber, the personal memories attached to it, and its connection to desire, alongside a performance series, a public conversation with other artists, and a small exhibition of materials, documents, and videos of field interviews with Southeast Asian rubberists. Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime acts as an imaginary school where multiple perspectives across the rubber value chain—plantation and factory labourers, tyre-shop employees, latex fetish practitioners—are brought into relation. It opens a space to reflect on entanglements between histories, monoculture ecologies, and the ways bodies, materials, and fantasies interact.