For the French philosopher Bruno Latour, ‘nature’ can’t exist in isolation, but only in relation to the ‘artificial’ or the ‘human-made’. In drawing a solid line between these two domains, he argues, we’re making a moral judgment rather than an ontological one: nature as good, its opposite as bad. Thinking outside that binary, he suggests, means rethinking the world not only as something acted upon by human agents, but as populated by other beings with agency of their own. Paired with visuals by the Barcelona-born, London-based filmmaker Gerard Ortín Castellví, this video gives shape to the divide Latour questions, showing the boundary between the natural world and the human one collapsing, to suggest the two are far more entangled than we tend to assume.
This video is part of the series A Vocabulary for the Future, produced by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. In it, notable thinkers reflect on a single word and are matched with filmmakers who give their writing a visual interpretation, inviting viewers to see familiar language anew.