A horny tomato and Rachel Carson's love letters walk into a bar.
"There are things in this world that are yet to be named" centers around Solanum plastisexum - an Australian tomato whose sexual expression is unpredictable and unstable, challenging even the fluid norms of the plant kingdom. Footage of the team of botanists who recently used their Solanum research to explode notions of sexual normativity in any plant or animal is combined with a voiceover of letters sent between science writer Rachel Carson and her lover Dorothy Freeman. "There are things in this world that are yet to be named" is a meditation on erasure, indefinability, and the intersection of queer and environmental histories.
Direction
Johnson's collision of archival intimacy and scientific observation.
Writing
Carson's letters recontextualized as queer ecological theory.
Editing
Precise juxtapositions that let plants and longing speak.
Director
Erin Johnson
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Carson and Freeman's relationship was obscured by biographers until 1995; this film participates in a larger reclamation of queer scientific history.
The Solanum species was specifically chosen for its taxonomic chaos—its very classification unstable, mirroring how queer identity resists fixed definition.
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