A Book of Humans

To be human is one way of being animal. Charles Darwin warned that the difference between humans and everything else is one of degree, not kind. There is no such thing as 'more human, ' just as there is no such thing as 'more dog, '" says ethologist and natural scientist Ricardo Ferrari. "It is time we move away from anthropo-exceptionalism — the idea that we are made in the image and likeness of something that is not alive. "

As humans, we have long imagined ourselves as the exception rather than the rule. We built our identity by separating ourselves from what we call "Nature" through an arbitrary aesthetic and symbolic boundary. Through this dual construction, we opposed nature and culture, nature and human, natural and artificial — relegating Nature to somewhere else, something outside of us.

Anthropocentrism has left us with the hidden inheritance that our sentience and cognition stand above all other forms of life. Yet philosopher Bruno Latour suggests that the concept of the "human" can be expanded beyond anatomy to include any entity capable of participating in the creation of meaning through symbolic organization. In other words, if being human implies the ability to construct symbols in order to make sense of the world, then many non-human beings — and even technologies — might also be considered human.

By deconstructing the notion of species-based supremacy, Un-Human opens new questions about the way we perceive and relate to the world we are part of. As anthropologist Philippe Descola writes in Beyond Nature and Culture: "Anthropology is thus faced with a daunting challenge: either to disappear as an exhausted form of humanism or else to transform itself by rethinking its domain and its tools in such a way as to include in its object far more than the anthropos. "

For the past ten years, I have been investigating the construction of what we call "nature. " One of the findings from this research revealed that 40% of respondents defined nature as an "other" — a place untouched, unaffected, and unmodified by humans. But if we are not nature, then what are we? What is a human being if not part of nature?

Through Un-Human, I seek to develop this inquiry into a cinematic and philosophical exploration that invites audiences to reflect on perhaps the most existential human question of all: what are we?