It’s not non-human animals on display in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new series — it’s nature itself. This is a nature show about the least natural thing of all: god. For the Darwinist, feelings are just an evolutionary training mechanism, a mere instinctual guide that has come to mean too much. If feelings are evolved, then they are also the voices of all who have come before us, an ancestral language far larger than any one being. There is a deep time to emotion, to our emotions towards other beings, human or otherwise. Natural Gods is a nature show beyond people. It looks at subjectivities that do not resemble our own, imagining an expansive consciousness bigger than individuals, or even entirely different from consciousness as we know it.The time after humans will leave society’s residue to be mined as if of a preternatural force for whomever or whatever comes after. It’s not cute creatures on view, it’s what seeps from spaces between symbols and language and rocks and bodies.
