Through history, the rubber tree has been at the root of multiple discoveries and stories. The peculiar properties of caoutchouc were first discovered and exploited by South American natives.
Early writings dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth century mention a tree called by local people ‘CAHUCHU‘, namely, weeping wood, because it secreted a sort of latex, hence our word caoutchouc. Back in 1770, Nairne is reported to have developed the first widely marketed rubber eraser, for an invention’s competition. Also in that year, in England, Joseph Priestley, observed that a piece of the material was extremely good for rubbing off pencil marks on paper, hence the name “rubber”.

The Story of the Rubber Tree is an ongoing project that examines the histories of Beirut’s abandoned houses, frequently re-inhabited and invaded by rubber trees. Once planted to provide shade in urban gardens, rubber trees now grow wild in the absence of people to manage them, undermining the foundations of the houses they occupy. Abed Al Kadiri’s new painting, sculpture, and video works trace the complex familial narratives and memories embedded in such spaces, taking the tree as witness to their histories. Consciously unfolding as chapters in a narrative, Al Kadiri reflects on the social, economic, and physical transformations that Beirut has undergone in the last century, through the prism of a single family’s home.

About this project Rachel Dedman worte: “Al Kadiri’s paintings chart the dissolution of a Lebanese dream, without becoming complicit in its fiction. In the final image the product of that work is all that’s left: a tangled stack of chairs that no one sits on. The house is not occupied by those whose legacy it was intended to constitute; in fact, the man’s family never appear at all. Al Kadiri’s meticulous drawings mark a departure from his existing painting practice. The work dwells in the world of the sketch, the unfinished; as though aware that seeking roots involves making fiction.”