"A Journey That Wasn’t" (2005)

"I’m filming the actual journey and a kind of parallel, a translation of this journey in the form of a musical in Central Park. The project happened to be in Antarctica so there’s all this mythology around it. You can think about Poe’s ‘Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,’ about all the Antarctic explorers, about the ozone hole. There are many parameters. I’m just trying to navigate through this crowd of references. It gives a certain tension to the work because each image reminds you of this or that, or that. But for me that’s just background. . . . We don’t know if I even went there- if I saw this island or the albino penguin. Maybe I did. Maybe it’s a special effect. I don’t care." - Pierre Huyghe ...

"I’m filming the actual journey and a kind of parallel, a translation of this journey in the form of a musical in Central Park. The project happened to be in Antarctica so there’s all this mythology around it. You can think about Poe’s ‘Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,’ about all the Antarctic explorers, about the ozone hole. There are many parameters. I’m just trying to navigate through this crowd of references. It gives a certain tension to the work because each image reminds you of this or that, or that. But for me that’s just background. . . . We don’t know if I even went there- if I saw this island or the albino penguin. Maybe I did. Maybe it’s a special effect. I don’t care."

- Pierre Huyghe