Car tires, sneakers, condoms and electrical insulation––all of these are made of rubber. The people of the Gulf Lowlands in present day Mexica made latex balls to play with since 1600 BCE, which became the basis of the name for the Olmec civilization (translating literally to Rubber People) that flourished there from 1200 BCE to 400 BCE and Aztecs used it to make containers and waterproof textiles. Today, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam are the biggest natural rubber producers, accounting for 60% of global production, or about 15 million metric tonnes of rubber annually.

But the history of rubber since its re-discovery by European and American chemists in the late 18th and early 19th century is chilling. Coercive and inhumane rubber extraction practices in Brazil, South America, Southeast Asia, India, and Belgian Congo led to an estimated 12 million deaths and severe deforestation. Native agricultural, artisanal and cultural practices were lost or abandoned as this industry gained hegemony over all aspects of life. All the while, rubber began leading to incredible innovations in transportation, medicine, electricity, and safety.

Started in 2023, Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime is a sprawling collaborative multimedia project by Bart Seng Wong and Kaisa Saarinen that explores historical and contemporary narratives around rubber as an essential material, a volatile commodity, and potent erotic fantasy. Along the way, it touches on the history of colonization and industrialization, fetish and sex economies, martial arts physiology, sympathetic magic and synthetic biology.

The Field Interviews you see here are a node of the Rubber Dreams network. They constitute an ongoing series of partly auto-fictional and partly factual interviews with rubber enthusiasts discussing how their personal lives have been affected by the uncanny allure of rubber. The anecdotes, personal commentaries, and locations that form these interviews constitute a living history of rubber. They explore it in a historico-fetishistic way, where rubber as a material is utilized as a tool to examine identities, form bonds, and investigate the slippery and confounding impulses that drive human activity––be it in the political, economic or intimate sphere.

So far, Bart's character has spoken to 4 different rubber enthusiasts:

Episode 1: BP102, interviewed on an October evening in the future 2040s in Hanoi, Vietnam

Episode 2: M. Shah, interviewed in February 2025 in Tengah Plantation District, Singapore

Episode 3: Stella Cheng, interviewed in July 2025 in the Quartier Asiatique of Paris, France

Episode 4: p’Punn interviewed  in December 2024 in Chanthaburi, Thailand

In-the-works and forthcoming Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime projects include feature-length documentary-fantasy film Heveaphilia, In the Land of Lady White Blood, hybrid non-fiction publications Milking Mother Earth and All of it Transformed into Something Nobody Knows live performance, and Corrida (Race). More interviews in the Field Interviews series are upcoming as well.

Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime is supported by the Kone Foundation.