Elastic Continuum

Elastic Continuum explores the flexible connections between people, plants, politics, and power through the material and symbolic transformations of Taraxacum koksaghyz—a rubber-producing plant commonly known as the Kazakh or Russian dandelion. The narrative of this new volume of K. Verlag's Processing Process series unfolds in two intertwined trajectories: one follows the plant’s historical journey from East to West, tracing its role within the political and economic imperialisms of the Soviet Union, Nazi-occupied Poland, wartime United States, and the European Union. The other retraces the artist Bethan Hughes's own path, moving from West to East, as she encounters the plant and the people entwined in its story across breeding facilities, research laboratories, herbaria, mountain valleys, and national archives.

Elastic Continuum expands the Hughes’s multi-part audiovisual installation, Hevea, by assembling fragments of the artist’s own writing with archival material, documentation, and an in-depth editorial conversation about the research. The book traces the entangled biographies of the dandelion species and the women whose lives became deeply interwoven through labor and geopolitical change. In doing so, it offers a poignant counter-narrative to the objectifying, extractive gaze, illuminating alternative ways of seeing and relating to the natural world.