THESE LATICIFERS KEEP BLEEDING...
First presented at the Jim Thompson Art Center for Ghost2568 Wish We Were Here, These Laticifers Keep Bleeding… melds together fragments from the larger Rubber Dreams of its Lifetime collaborative project in a three-channel video installation. The material is encountered in its endless guises in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Initiated by Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen, Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime explores rubber as commodity fetish and fetish commodity. The project focuses on the Southeast Asian industry as a microcosm of globalized supply chains, connecting with issues and inquiries of global importance. Grounded in extensive field research, it aims to produce a multi-disciplinary body of work, including a documentary-fantasy film titled Heveaphilia. With the intention to subvert mainstream perception of fetishism, the work employs the transformative potential of the fetish to disrupt and expand understanding of the material and its profound influence on social history, pre-modern spirituality, geopolitics and metaphysics.
The project was joined by Bangkok-based artist Komtouch Napattaloong for the field research on rubber production and its entangled histories in Southern Thailand. Spiraling out from this collaboration, the film In the Land of Lady White Blood explores both personal and regional histories of Southern Thailand through essayistic and “post-documentary” cinematic forms. Through the prism of “white blood” a recurring image tied to latex harvesting, contested land, and regional myths of Lady White Blood, the film traces overlapping legacies of power and violence. These include the fall of the Singora Sultanate, the murky lineage of the Na Phatthalung clan, the development of napalm following the World War II “rubber crisis”, land dispossession and the 1970s anti-communist purges, and the Siamese lords’ expropriation of the Lady White Blood manuscripts.
Extracted from Heveaphilia, four talking-head interviews with rubberists from the SEA region connect their personal relationships with rubber to broader themes of historical materialism, the Malayan Emergency, martial arts physiology, synthetic biology, and the enigmatic nature of the laticifer cell; while fantasmagorical scenes from the film provide a visual backdrop that extends or counterpoints their narrations. These segments coalesce with haunted excerpts of Southern Thai myths, revolutionary struggles, familial memories, and global warfare from In the Land of Lady White Blood. Through the entangling of these narratives, ‘Laticifers…’ creates new linkages and resonances that continually expand on each other.
Initiated by Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen, Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime explores rubber as commodity fetish and fetish commodity. The project focuses on the Southeast Asian industry as a microcosm of globalized supply chains, connecting with issues and inquiries of global importance. Grounded in extensive field research, it aims to produce a multi-disciplinary body of work, including a documentary-fantasy film titled Heveaphilia. With the intention to subvert mainstream perception of fetishism, the work employs the transformative potential of the fetish to disrupt and expand understanding of the material and its profound influence on social history, pre-modern spirituality, geopolitics and metaphysics.
The project was joined by Bangkok-based artist Komtouch Napattaloong for the field research on rubber production and its entangled histories in Southern Thailand. Spiraling out from this collaboration, the film In the Land of Lady White Blood explores both personal and regional histories of Southern Thailand through essayistic and “post-documentary” cinematic forms. Through the prism of “white blood” a recurring image tied to latex harvesting, contested land, and regional myths of Lady White Blood, the film traces overlapping legacies of power and violence. These include the fall of the Singora Sultanate, the murky lineage of the Na Phatthalung clan, the development of napalm following the World War II “rubber crisis”, land dispossession and the 1970s anti-communist purges, and the Siamese lords’ expropriation of the Lady White Blood manuscripts.
Extracted from Heveaphilia, four talking-head interviews with rubberists from the SEA region connect their personal relationships with rubber to broader themes of historical materialism, the Malayan Emergency, martial arts physiology, synthetic biology, and the enigmatic nature of the laticifer cell; while fantasmagorical scenes from the film provide a visual backdrop that extends or counterpoints their narrations. These segments coalesce with haunted excerpts of Southern Thai myths, revolutionary struggles, familial memories, and global warfare from In the Land of Lady White Blood. Through the entangling of these narratives, ‘Laticifers…’ creates new linkages and resonances that continually expand on each other.
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