Whilst in Gijón, Bethan Hughes produced An Elastic Continuum: rubber, gender and power as part of her ongoing artistic research project Hevea. It explores how natural rubber — an organic substance bound up with the rise of capitalism, imperialism, and modernity — embodies the ways in which humans and non-humans are intimately entangled with the military-industrial complex. Unfolding over a series of installations which combine moving-image, sound, sculpture, and text, the project makes tangible the inextricable links that exist between people, plants, politics and power.

Taraxacum Koksaghyz, aka the Russian dandelion, is a rubber-containing plant endemic to Kazakhstan. An Elastic Continuum: rubber, gender and power traces the convoluted journey of this humble ‘weed’ — from the Tien Shan mountains to collective farms across the USSR, greenhouses at Auschwitz to the laboratories of multi-national rubber corporations today—and the stories of the women connected to it.

The work manifests as a single-channel video and spatial sound installation that brings together material captured over a period of months in multiple places: the Berlin Botanical Garden and Museum, the Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Münster, and various locations in and around Almaty, Kazakhstan. The sound, developed in collaboration with the artist Diego Flórez, is embedded within a series of sculptures akin to hybrid human-plant bodies. A textural mixture of voice and field recordings, this sound sculpture acts as a polyphonic choir that articulates how both people and plants come to be entangled within, and objectified by, the machinations of politics, war and commerce.