Car tires, sneakers, condoms and electrical insulation––all of these are made of rubber. The Olmec civilization was making latex balls to play with since 1600 BC in what is now Mexico, 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 plantation labor 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 eclipsed and forgotten as this industry gained hegemony over all aspects of life. All the while, rubber has led 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, volatile economy 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.

Field Interviews is a component of Rubber Dreams. It is 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 characters emerged from These Laticifers Keep Bleeding, another node of the Rubber Dreams network, created especially for the 2025 Ghost2568 Festival in Bangkok, Thailand. Laticifers are essential yet enigmatic specialized cells that synthesize and accumulate latex but also opium, depending on the plant. These Laticifers Keep Bleeding puts four Southeast Asian rubberists into relation, interspersed with haunted excerpts of Southern Thai mythology, recollections of revolutionary struggles, family histories. While filming Laticifers, Bart Seng Wong realized there were stories around rubber that needed to be told separately. Thus Field Interviews was born. The anecdotes, personal commentaries, and locations that form these interviews constitute a living history of rubber while using it in a historico-fetishistic way where the 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 has spoken to 4 different characters:

Episode 1: BP102, interviewed on an October evening in the 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; 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 and more in the Field Interviews series. Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime is supported by the Kone Foundation.