Kamran Sadeghi, New York-based musician and member of the Soundwalk Collective, contributed the musical score for Mario Pfeifer’s video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear (2014). For his digital compositions Sadeghi, in dialogue with Pfeifer, 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.

The artwork for the LP was created by Markus Weisbeck, who also designed the accompanying publication. The design is based on photographs and video stills of Approximation as well as reproductions from the Anthropos Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany, which hosts Gusinde’s estate.

The publication and LP are published on the occasion of solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes – Museo sin Muros, Santiago, Chile (2014), KOW, Berlin (2015), and CIRCA Projects, Newcastle upon Tyne (2015). They also serves as an appendix to the multichannel video installation produced by Mario Pfeifer on Tierra del Fuego, Chile, which 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). The publication will be available in summer 2015.

12-inch LP
Musical score written and produced by Kamran Sadeghi, commissioned by Mario Pfeifer for the multichannel video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear.