Focusing on queer mapping, unclassifiable plants, land use, and a herd of goats, this program presents four of Erin Johnson’s videos that explore interspecies relationships and taxonomic blindspots to invite a reappraisal of colonial scientific narratives.
In To Be Sound Is to Be Solid (2022, 15 minutes), an oceanographer’s attempt to map the entire seafloor by 2030 parallels the filmmaker’s attempt to decipher the opaque queer history of a modernist seaside home through its complicated and circuitous floor plan. There Are Things In This World That Are Yet To Be Named (2020, 8 minutes) pairs images of a plant whose fluid sexual expression has baffled botanists for decades, with voiceover of the private correspondence between influential environmentalist Rachel Carson and her secretly beloved addressee, Dorothy Freeman. Heavy Water (2018, 15 minutes) follows a Department of Energy biologist tasked with studying the impact of radioactive waste on animals living in the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons complex in South Carolina. The two-channel video brings together the precarious, untenable future of nuclear waste with the uncertain past of a breed of dogs living on the site, following tensions between individual and state, ecological diversity and climate change. If It Won’t Hold Water, It Surely Won’t Hold a Goat (2014, 10 minutes) is an intimate meditation on the subversive nature of goats and their effect on the people who spend time with them.
The screening of the films will be followed by a discussion with Heather Davis on the intersections of queer life and nature.
Erin Johnson’s videos and immersive installations explore the experience of being in groups. Drawing upon queer communities, histories of organizing, and networks of non-human life, Johnson’s work challenges colonial scientific narratives and normative truth claims.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
More information on the event can be found here.