Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its legacy of technological, scientific, and economic thinking built around accumulation and “progress.” Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film refracts its factual historical research through a hallucinatory, narrative lens, mixing reality and fiction to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story.

Visual and verbal motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance.

Posing a counter-model to industrial capital’s destructive obsession with growth, the film looks to the earth’s legion of decomposing mushrooms as protagonists, arguing for a thinking in which growth and decay are granted equal importance. Informed by Marxist ecological criticism and Gothic horror fiction as much as by scientific and historical research, this film proposes an alternate narrative to familiar ideas of progress and ecology in the post-industrial world.