Pierre Huyghe

Huyghe pursues conceptual gestures relating to a wide variety of themes, from living systems to restaged events. The animation One Million Kingdoms, 2001, forms part of a larger seminal project called No Ghost Just a Shell that was initiated with Philippe Parreno in 1999. Together they acquired the rights from a manga agency to a character called Annlee, lifting this generic fictional entity into the central role in a series of international art projects. In 2001 Huyghe and Parreno decided to abandon their rights to the character, and we encounter Annlee on a journey into her own vanishing. As she walks a computer-generated landscape forms from the textures of her voice: a voice synthesised from recordings of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, and extracts from Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth.