When I first met Erin Johnson and her dog Winnie on Fire Island, in the waning days of summer 2021, all I knew about her was that she was an artist who made videos. I can’t recall a wisp of what we talked about that day—I was in the midst of a breakup and incapable of thinking about anything other than myself—but I remember her openness, and how comfortable she made me feel. Trapped in my own mind as I gazed at the Atlantic, I couldn’t have been less capable of approaching the world as I now know Erin does, with radical empathy for human and nonhuman others alike.

More than four years later and, I hope, a bit less self-obsessed, I met with Erin and Winnie to discuss her filmmaking practice and its roots in political organizing, ecological science, queer and postcolonial theory, and the Bay Area, where I grew up and she first became an artist. Over the last decade, Erin has established a moving-image practice that explores the ambiguities of our relationship to the natural world. She has filmed a former nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina, an island off of Puerto Rico that’s occupied by more than 1,000 macaque monkeys, and a sexually fluid Australian tomato species—all a part of her quest to center instances when gender classifications stop operating, inherited taxonomies fail, and human-animal distinctions fall away. She asks us to confront the raw and rowdy stuff of life.

When I went back and watched one of your earliest films, If it Won’t Hold Water, it Surely Won’t Hold a Goat (2014), I realized that it contains all of your interests, even if the film isn’t worked out to the level of technical finesse that your current work is. This idea of nature’s unruliness seems to be one of the central subjects of your inquiry.

Yes! I love looking at how lifeforms resist against oppressive structures and classifications, which opens up new possibilities for how they can exist. In the film, it was a fence. I chronicled my herd of goats for a few years, watching them slip through, or jump over, everything I came up with to keep them in. At the same time, my neighbor told me about the Goat Man—whose story became part of the film, too. From 1935 to 1985, he walked the roads of Georgia with a herd of goats and was a real spectacle. I think his way of being in the world offered up some sort of opening to the people who saw him. He believed in this idea of the “law of contagion,” where contact between two people, animals, or objects creates an indelible, magical link. So by being with the goats and caring for them, people could bring about their own uncontainable nature.

Courtesy of Erin Johnson

What is your experience with agriculture and farming? What even brought you to that place of wanting to learn about nature as it interacts with humans?

I was a kid in 4-H and other farming clubs. But the things that we learned were often very geared towards industrial agriculture, monocropping. At 18, I went to Warren Wilson College where I learned so much more about international solidarity and what it looks like in relation to land and water sovereignty struggles, extractionism, and human and non-human displacement. It’s a place really interested in developing ways to live with plants and other non-human animals cooperatively and collaboratively, in ways that are ethical and let everything flourish.

And you're documenting people trying to do that, or failing to.

In the case of Heavy Water (2018), it’s about failing. It’s a two-channel work that looks at the complexities of the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons facility in South Carolina. The biologist in the film is telling us that it’s a nature preserve, which by some stretch of the imagination it is. It’s one of the most biodiverse areas in the South, because people don’t have access to much of the land. At the same time, it's one of the most polluted places in the world—it’s a superfund site. I'm really interested in people's fantasies and justifications around the kinds of destructive and violent things they do. We’re all destructive, to a certain extent.

How do you find your subject matter? For instance, the monkeys in Cayo Santiago (2022)?

My aunt actually works with primates; she studies monkeys in Costa Rica, and she tipped me off to the Caribbean Primate Research Center on Cayo Santiago, off the coast of Puerto Rico. The Center was conceived here in New York, at Columbia University in 1938. 500 monkeys were kidnapped from their homes in India and brought to Cayo, in the name of vaccine research. All of the monkeys in the film are descendants of those original 500. It brings up lots of questions around interspecies theft and exploitation, surveillance, and science. Cayo Santiago is also where Hurricane Maria made landfall. So it's a center or touchstone for thinking about climate change, too.

The film that you’ve been working on at Pioneer Works this past year is about ferns, and it’s related to Banu Subramanian’s recent book, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, right?

Banu and her incredible book are both part of the project. But it actually started because of a film I made a couple years ago, There are things in this world that are yet to be named (2020). It takes place in a lab where they’re working on a strain of Australian tomato whose sexual expression is ever-changing. Like many other plants, it's so expansive and flamboyant that it can't fit within the constraints defined by plant science. When I started working on that film, I got turned on to herbaria in general. Then I saw in the news that Duke University’s huge herbarium was closing, and there was a huge uproar in the scientific community about the fate of that herbarium, along with natural history museums and collections all over the world. I reached out to Dr. Kathleen Pryer, the director, and we talked about it. Everything began unfolding—that's when I learned she named a genus of ferns after Lady Gaga. I cast drag performers from North Carolina to be in the film, and I was able to bring in Banu and her work on botany in relation to histories of colonialism and homophobia.

Your films aren't about sexuality in an obvious way—other than To be Sound is to Be Solid (2022), which is about a lesbian couple’s house in Maine—but are more about the world of classification. At the very least, sexuality is not the only question.

Questions around classification have fascinated me forever. I come to them largely through a queer discourse, and then my films end up becoming about goats [laughter]. I’m not, like, I’m gay, so I’m going to make this film gay. To Be Sound is to Be Solid is very explicitly about a lesbian couple, but the rest of the work isn't. When I'm talking about unruliness, I'm talking about a lesbian history, a queer history, but also about the unruliness made possible only by showing up in your body. I’m thinking about my time in the Bay Area, where I moved from North Carolina. It’s so important to show up in your body, whether it's to protest in the streets or just to meet people.

How long did you organize for? How much was that a part of your life, and do you still do it? What's your relationship to organizing now?

Starting in junior high and high school, I was organizing around all kinds of things. I started with the rights of non-human animals, and then moved into farming and more of an interest in environmental justice, but also thinking about class and the disparities between rural communities and urban populations. And then when I moved to the Bay, there was so much going on around queer organizing and labor organizing, particularly around food.

I could see you making a documentary or feature film about those topics, but your works are like essay films. They’re not prescriptive, they just wander.

I love feature-length documentaries, but they often want you to land at a certain place by the end. And I don’t have a certain place I want you to land. My work is ambiguous, but not ambivalent. I’m trying to think through something with the audience, because I don’t have a conclusion. I'm always resisting that form. I get close to completion and then I find myself reacting or needing to move away from it. One of the ways I deal with that is by making different iterations of the same footage. With Cayo Santiago, there's a version that doesn't have any text or voiceover and that’s what I imagine as an installation in a gallery, that you float through and around. If you're moved, you can read the wall text and find out more about what this place is and its history. I like having different versions for different contexts, whether it's a film festival where you watch the whole thing, or an installation where you assume that people aren't going to see the beginning or the middle or the end. How do you make the work nimble in that way?

So you start with a question to be explored rather than a problem to be solved?

Yes. And then also: here are some images of something I find compelling or troubling, and let's think about it together. For example, the islet of Cayo Santiago has been rarely pictured or seen by the public. There's some National Geographic footage, some Science Magazine pictures, that kind of thing. But its totality and its infrastructure was never really filmed like I filmed it, beyond just glamour shots of monkeys or propaganda. I wanted to share it, and now we can take it together from here.

Courtesy of Erin Johnson

The next project I've been thinking about is an image that’s been seared into my mind, even though I've never seen it. In Ireland there's a really huge bird sanctuary, which I did visit once, though I missed the season when all of the baby puffins are born and learn to swim. They leap from the cliffs next to a lighthouse. They jump towards the moon. In order to not confuse the baby birds as to where the moon is, they turn the lighthouse from white light to red. If you can imagine the image of a red strobe that crosses the cliffs at just the right moment when a bird is jumping off the cliff for the first time… that’s the next film I want to make.

Wow, so cute!

So cute!

In the culture of YouTube and TikTok, it seems to me that in the last couple years everyone's moved from making a still image to making a moving one. What is your role in that ecosystem?

I've thought about that a lot actually. What is the point of turning on the camera if there's already so much footage in the world? You could easily make very beautiful found footage films forever. Something that I'm interested in, however, is documenting something that doesn't have documentation yet, or hasn't been filmed in the same way. There are some still images from the herbarium maybe, but no one has filmed the work being done in that space. The way I'm trying to image it is different from something that exists currently. I don’t think it’s that important to make something new, but physically going to a place is. I love to go places, and I love talking to people. Filming is always a way to learn something new.

Maybe that’s an antidote to digital culture as it exists right now, making space for that in your own life. My last question is very vague, very general, but what is our relationship to non-human animals? I have a cat, and sometimes I look at her and I'm like, I can't believe we get to live together. How crazy is it that she and I are friends?

The only hope we have for anything is friendship, whether it's with non-human animals, or water and minerals, whatever. Just really seeing everything as a friend. Going back to my schooling, Warren Wilson is a work college. There are no anonymous staff members, and every job is done by a student you probably know. Everything you do impacts a friend, or someone you care about. That was so foundational, this lesson that every action impacts somebody else or another life form or system. I think a lot about Silvia Federici’s work and how she reminds us, in the face of the war that capitalism is waging on us, to resist and refuse being the policemen, the guards, the settlers. And instead, to join together, find our collective interests, bring all of our struggles, and come up with new structures and ways of being. ♦

Erin Johnson’s 2023-2024 Pioneer Works residency was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s inaugural Working Artists Fellowship program, a part of the Foundation’s The Artist Impact Initiative.