Natural Materials & National Resources on Display

I am fascinated by the complex relationship between Western ideas of nature and culture, and how these are played in design, here understood not only as a professional activity and an academic discipline but also as method of making and a way of knowing.

This fascination stems from my work on displays of raw materials in what I have called ‘design pageantries’, that is, International Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs that, during the long nineteenth century, exhibited lavishly built pavilions, elaborate artifacts, technological advances, and manufacturing processes as signs of progress. Material culture scholars and design historians, despite focusing on objects and the material and symbolic processes behind their manufacture and consumption, have shied away from tackling the issue of the commodification of natural materials and their conceptual and practical transformation into ‘raw materials’, ‘natural resources’ or ‘national resources.’

I have found, however, that displays of extracted or cultivated raw materials like timber, coal, coffee, or gold played a significant role in these design pageantries and in the formation of Western capitalist modernity. Through my work, we now know how natural materials can be conceptualized, displayed, and commodified as ‘things’ in themselves before becoming manufactured, designed objects.

Expanding my long-standing interest on the environmental impacts of design practices, my latest historical research on the 1880s-1910s’ rubber boom in the Amazon River basin discusses the social injustices experienced by local rubber tappers and the effects of industrial-scale extractivism in the region.