Mario Pfeifer developed his latest project, Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear, in Puerto Williams, the southernmost settlement in the world on the Chilean archipelagos of Patagonia bordering Argentina. The publication, designed by Markus Weisbeck equally as an artists book and research compendium, engagesthrough essays, annotated texts, and a conversation between Thomas Seelig and Mario Pfeiferdiscourses of cultural production from an anthropological-artistic approach about indigenous representation, territorial politics in the postcolonial age, and the traces of German missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in Chile and beyond. Included is Hugo Palmarolas essay, Folding Culture, the first in-depth investigation published on the Yagána jeep built in cooperation with Citron in the 1970sas a socioeconomic and political symbol of Chiles turbulent coup détat and relationship to its indigenous population in the far south.
This publication documents Mario Pfeifers multiple-screen video installation and production process as well as his archival research at the Martin Gusinde Estate at the Anthropos Institut in Sankt Augustin and in the ethnomusicology department of the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin. A special edition LP was released with the bilingual publication on the occasion of Pfeifers first institutional solo exhibition in Latin America and further presentations in Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Brussels, Concepción, Newcastle, New York, Seoul, Santiago de Chile, and Winterthur.
