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Yours, KOW

Corpo Fechado, 2016

video installation

Corpo Fechado is a recently produced 4K Video Installation in São Paulo, Brazil focussing on societal conditions in relation to spiritual and religious practices in the megapolis.

Constructed in three episodes and three interludes the video introduces the practices of :

Christavao Chrystal – a healer who treats with extraterrestrial forces that have never incarnated on Earth, curing societal diseases such as depression, anxiety, etc with the goal to help people to develop themselves as better human beings in order to improve a global situation to live together in a more sustainable and caring way. The energy he usesto heal originate from five entities living 195 billion light years away, in a parallel galaxy. The video animation documents the energy travel by using up-to-date scientific and mathematical patterns to illustrate what “science” knows today about the universe and our galaxy.

Tata Katuvengeci, a leader in the afro-religion Candomblé in the tradition of the Congo-Angola Bantu culture who combines socio-political and religious practices in a Terreiro in the outskirts of São Paulo addressing issues of racism, oppression, and institutional neglect. He practices an accumulation process to re-install the purest forms of Candomblé which originated from West-African Nations during the slave trade over the Atlantic in the 16th century.

Makumba Cyber is a post-religious manifest written by Xarlô that addresses our contemporaneity through a digitalized, immaterial representation - from the the state of nature to a new state under the white flag of peace. Makumba Cyber originates in the tropical rainforest and departing to the Latin American Memorial in São Paulo through a journey of social and political crisis to which the manifesto invokes a new way of human engagement to save the planets’s prosperity.

The episodes are interconnected through interludes that introduces sites of production of religious objects. Here chain and hand-produced objects are manufactured and distributed globally for believers of all major religions, on the junction of labour, market and faith.

Corpo Fechado is a video installation situated between documentary and fiction, between reality and belief, between social realism and philosophical prediction in the age of media and tradition.

Each Episode was produced in collaboration with the practitioner – both to represent core ideas of the practice and ideology but also as a critical reflection on the societal condition we live in through the lens of faith. Each Episode ends with the URL under which the practitioner can be reached, grounding a viewer that the seen and heard has a body to consult with, what is been shown on screen is mere a reality than fiction.

Mario Pfeifer, Corpo Fechado, 2016, 4K video installation, color, surround sound
Mario Pfeifer, Corpo Fechado, 2016, 4K video installation, color, surround sound
Mario Pfeifer, Corpo Fechado, 2016, 4K video installation, color, surround sound
Mario Pfeifer, Corpo Fechado, 2016, 4K video installation, color, surround sound
Mario Pfeifer, Corpo Fechado, 2016, 4K video installation, color, surround sound

Research and production assistance by Rodrigo Rodriguez
Animation design by Jonas Dahl
Architectural renderings by Sebastian Lippok
Music by Kamran Sadeghi
Sound design by Thomas Wallmann

Brazil, Germany, USA
© 2016 Mario Pfeifer, KOW

Supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department

Mario Pfeifer

Mario Pfeifer was born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. His work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion. After his studies in Leipzig (HGB) and Berlin (UDK), Pfeifer graduates from Willem de Rooij's class at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008. He is a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles (California Institute of the Arts) in 2008/09. Further grants and projects lead him to Bangkok, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Beirut, Tierra del Fuego, Santiago de Chile, and New York. Mario participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), the 11th Bienal do Mercosul (2017), the 3° Montevideo Bienal (2016) as well as the 4th Marrakesh Biennal (2012). Survey exhibitions took place in 2016 at the GfZK Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig and in 2019 at The Power Plant Toronto. In 2019 IDFA commissioned the first performance work AGAIN – Live which premiered at Amsterdam's Pakhuis de Zwijger. Pfeifer lives in Berlin and Dresden. In 2023 Pfeifer was awarded the Hessian Film- and Cinema award in the categorie "Best Short Film" for "Zelle 5 - Eine Rekonstruktion".



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