Philippe Parreno: C.H.Z.

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 se