Boundary Layers
From the beginning of the film...
...Let’s start with the mosses, the bryophytes. They’re often the first colonist species to arrive, and it’s thought these mosses are not dissimilar to the first plants that came out of the water onto land, more than four hundred million years ago. Without roots, tiny hairs anchor them to the surfaces of rocks, cement, trees, logs, bricks, anything that they can find, and they pull their nutrition from the atmosphere around them.
Here, they’re carpeting steps that go to nowhere, are thickening and softening the tops of walls, edging over surfaces and settling into the cracks of concrete that has been split by water and ice and heat and cold. They’re lining and softening the ghost circumferences of cooling towers and gas holders, the footprint of the stripmill, coke ovens, offices, furnaces, admin. offices and everything else that exists as the spectre of Ravenscraig Steelworks, in Motherwell, just outside of Glasgow...