The film observes the abstraction of Margherita’s landscape across 200 years, spanning from the early 19th century to the present. The work looks at the emerging extractive ambitions, a flourishing industrial complex, capitalistic greed and moral death. Disparate media present a sensorial framing of the landscape’s transformation through mechanized movements.The visuals weave in and out of the shape of colonial desire, industrial order, systemic neglect and ecological collapse. The viewer follows the occupation and transformation of a rainforest, carried by voice-overs narrated by a colonial engineer, a steam engine, a flat-bed truck, and the landscape itself. The film opens with the arrival of European colonists in Ma:kum, Assam, and the discovery of coal in the region. 

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Italian engineer Roberto Paganini arrives with a contingent of the East India Company to Dibrugarh, after having sailed from England through Morocco around the Arabian Sea to Calcutta, and taking a boat on the Brahmaputra thereafter. Paganini’s task is to clear the primeval rainforest, dig the mines, lay the railway lines, and design the colliery infrastructure. He writes to his son reflecting on his encounters with the landscape, about his daunting task of terraforming a rainforest into a habitable, industrial colony.

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The film follows various elements of the colonial machinery, primarily, the steam engine, one of modernity's greatest tools. The function of the steam engine becomes a narrative device, as we follow the engine through landscapes, regions and mountains. Serene hamlets host the path of the steam engine, as it crawls through the daily lives of locals, in a strange organic-industrial coexistence.