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 a workshop 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.

Workshop

In Gimping in the Counterarchive, personal memories of rubber serve as a starting point for exploring the complex histories of the material. The two-part workshop combines writing, collaging, and improvisational role-play to offer a counter-archival process that is shaped by its participants. Attendees are invited to write about their memories or impressions of rubber and collaboratively work on printed materials provided by the artists. Through cutting, sketching, erasure poetry, liquid latex, or methods of choice, this work will be shaped into a process-based archive object to be sealed in rubber. Concurrently, the performance-based leg of the workshop explores possibilities of gimp-subterfuge and self-fetishisation takes place, where participants can wear a gimp hood and improvise a performance in front of a camera - please note that it is not mandatory to take part in this activity.

Lecture performance

Lifetimes of Rubber Dreams is a performance-lecture by Kaisa Saarinen and Bart Seng Wen Long, stretching from the ancient sacrificial bogs of the Olmecs to the skin-tight silhouettes of city gimps. It presents a polyphonic story about how rubber’s magical mutability forces the material into the bind between commodity fetish and fetish commodity. Followed by a conservation with Roland Gunst /John K Cobra and Rossella Biscotti.

Monologue performance

Views of rubber from a fet-ish vantage unfolds as a confessional of a field researcher attempting autoethnography as a rubber-wearing rubber tapper. It takes the practice of embodied research as a starting point to interrogate the interrelated compulsions of erotic, commodity, cross-cultural, and epistemic fetishism.