On the outskirts of London there is a small electroplating plant that is close to closure. Founded in the 1930s to employ the disabled and amputees, Servex looks like a fossil from history. The encrustations of chemicals, the old songs, the calcified pin-up posters, the brown and greenish tones of the photography: everything renders the suspended atmosphere of a cave, a crystallised time from which the gestures of the workers emerge, the presence of a place. Ben Rivers, one of England's most acclaimed artists and documentary filmmakers, abandons the desolate rural settings so dear to his cinema and casts his gaze on an industrial landscape nearing its end, an alien world where the combination of human and material reacts with unique evocative force and visual beauty.
