Shahar Livne

The Devil’s Milk
Taking its title from John Tully’s social history of rubber, The Devil’s Milk: Narratives of Natural Rubber is a design and material research project by Shahar Livne. While rubber is a ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, elastic, inert, and essential, it carries a dark, often forgotten legacy. Whether sourced naturally from the Hevea trees of South America, Asia, and Africa, or synthetically engineered from petrochemicals, rubber is a material defined by both its utility and its history of violence.
Livne utilizes a critical design lens to peel back the layers of this material, exploring the parallels between the human and plant body. Her investigation spans from the «Rubber Terror» in the Congo under King Leopold II to the abandoned ruins of Henry Ford’s Fordlândia in the Amazon. A specific focus is placed on Dutch colonial practices in Indonesia, tracing how 19th-century bioprospecting evolved into a far-reaching industrial complex that now seeps into our homes, bodies, and global infrastructures.
By revealing the «governance of violence» inherent in rubber’s history, Livne seeks to re-evaluate our role within the material world. This research further expands into a collection of design objects, each of which tells a story to engage the viewer in a dialogue on how we can understand the past and present to be able to reshape the future of this essential yet contested resource.