Loren Johnson

ARTIST

This ongoing documentary project engages connection as both subject and method—inviting friends, family, and the filmmaker themself into lightly structured, ritual encounters within natural environments. These meetings—guided by prompts, time constraints, and shared space—become experiments in presence, relational form, and co-performance, with the camera acting not as observer but as an embedded witness.

At the heart of the project is a generative tension: what, if anything, separates a “good” performance of connection from an “authentic” one? Or, following Judith Butler, if performance is the reiterative structure through which subjects and social meanings are produced, might connection itself—when consciously enacted—be understood as a form of performative truth? The project does not attempt to resolve this question, but to inhabit it, aesthetically and socially.

The work is also situated in an environmental contrast: the relational textures of constructed, often hierarchical (“vertical”) environments versus those of natural, unscripted (“horizontal”) space. Built environments tend to reinforce symbolic structures—identity, legibility, control. Forests, water, open land invite something else: a relational mode less governed by distinction, more by attunement. Here, closeness becomes less about recognition and more about resonance.

In this sense, the project is in conversation with Lauren Berlant’s exploration of the politics of intimacy—how what is commonly our private lives actually organize public life—and seeks to test what becomes possible when intimacy is neither privatized nor romanticized, but practiced as a shared form of attention. The hope is not to uncover something more “real” beneath the social, but to compose conditions where connection can be felt, risked, and re-imagined—together.