Two or Three Saprophytes (the video essay from which this image is drawn) 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.

Posing a counter-model to industrial capital’s destructive obsession with growth, Rufelds’ project looks to the Earth’s legion of decomposing mushrooms as protagonists, arguing that growth and decay should be granted equal importance. Informed by Marxist ecological criticism and Gothic horror fiction, as much as by scientific and historical research, Two or Three Saprophytes proposes an alternate narrative to familiar ideas of progress and ecology in the post-industrial world.