This project examines museum archives in Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg that contain early rubber artefacts collected from the Amazon, both before and after the invention of vulcanisation. These artefacts, such as toys, tools and shoes, reflect Europe’s early scientific and commercial fascination with this previously unknown material, which was brought back by travellers, traders and colonisers.

The archives also expose the violent histories behind rubber extraction, tied to genocide, forced labor, and colonial exploitation in regions like Putumayo and the Congo. By categorizing these artifacts within colonial systems of knowledge, the archives document not only the objects themselves but also the appropriation and transformation of Indigenous knowledge, reduced to “raw” or “primitive” materials.

The photo series highlights these tensions by showing both the artifacts and their colonial classification structures, layered with imagery from rubber plantations. Together, these “archives of extractivism” reveal how colonial violence, material exploitation, and epistemic dispossession became embedded in archival practices.

Some of the ideas in this project on the extractivism of knowledge have already been published in the text ‘Epistemic Extractivism’. ︎︎︎