To be Sound is to Be Solid, 2022
When artist Erin Johnson and film editor Charlotte Prager moved into a seaside house in 2021, they knew only a handful of facts about the two women who designed and built it in 1971. The two women - art collector Mary-Leigh Smart and artist Beverly Hallam - were exacting about their specifications for the house, and they lived there together for over forty years. In To be Sound is to be Solid, the filmmakers venture to decipher the house's opaque queer history by studying its complicated and circuitous floor plan.
While traversing rooms and hallways, Johnson speaks with a member of an international team of oceanographers attempting to map the entire seafloor by 2030. The two discuss the difficulty in getting an accurate read of something that you can’t see or touch directly, the act of filling in the gaps between what is known and unknown, and the process by which the ocean’s floor is constantly creating and destroying itself. Recordings of theses conversations reverberate throughout the film, creating shifts in past and present, fact and fiction, amidst themes of misinterpretation, fixity, opacity, and queer desire.
To be Sound is to be Solid is a film of layered intimacies and vicarious encounters. By investigating indefinability, erasure, and transparency in queer archives and scientific research, the film builds connections between lesbian, architectural, and environmental histories.
