c.h.z. Philippe Parreno

Renowned for his sophisticated ruminations on nature and artifice, character and its construction, and the transformative lens of history and nostalgia, Philippe Parreno (born 1964) created C.H.Z. in a zone between science and fiction. According to NASA, any planet hospitable to life will most likely orbit a pair of dwarf stars in a Continuously Habitable Zone. The effect of multiple stars is black vegetation. Working with landscape architect Bas Smets, the artist painstakingly constructed a garden of black plants on the side of a mountain in Portugal, where the garden continues to flourish outside the framework of an art object; Parreno then shot a poetic, abstract film in that alien landscape, rendering the territory inescapably cinematic. C.H.Z. features the artist´s dark, impasto ink drawings, which functioned as a storyboard for the cinematographer Darius Khondji, as well as sequences of stills of the seven stages of the film. Parreno´s reflections and commentary are featured alongside the images and paired with comprehensive essay by Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.