Musician Kamran Sadeghi took field recordings from an anthropological research on Tierra del Fuego as a starting point to compose his digital musical score for a video installation by
Mario Pfeifer.
Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear is a three-channel video installation shot in 2014 by Mario Pfeifer on Tierra del Fuego, Chile. It was nominated for the German Competition at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2015) and had its world premiere at Migrating Forms, New York (2014). Commissioned by Pfeifer, Sadeghi's digital composition took the field recordings made by missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in 1923 of Yaghan chants in Bahia Mejillones as point of departure and reference. The chants—one of which is digitally reproduced on the LP—are the only documents of their kind of the religious ceremonies and rites of the Yaghans, who have inhabited the southernmost parts of the world for more than 6.500 years and were, at that time, living on Shunuko, an island today known as Isla Navarino, in Tierra del Fuego. The original field recordings were made on wax cylinders, which are housed today at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin where they were digitalized.
Published on the occasion of Mario Pfeifer solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes – Museo sin Muros, Santiago, Chile, 2014, KOW, Berlin, and CIRCA Projects, Newcastle, 2015.
Mario Pfeifer (born 1981 in Dresden, lives and works in Berlin and New York) is a German filmmaking artist.
