BACKWAYS, 2019

2-channel-video-installation

Backways is a two-channel-video-installation produced in Sinthian / Senegal with rapper and activist Negger Dou Tamba. In Negger Dou's Song Backways, as in the subsequent conversation, he calls on young Africans to use their local resources, to cultivate the land and to develop autonomy in and for Africa - instead of seeking a false Eldorado in secluded Europe and for that to risk their lives. In the face of the current debate about refugees in distress, Backways creates an alternative space for discourse through the poetics of rap music and agricultural activism to influence the fate of those seeking the dream of self-determination and prosperity in a politically dramatically changing Europe.

2-channel-video-installation, 5min, colour, stereo
Wolof with English Subtitles
feat. Negger Dou Tamba

Backways was commissioned by Villa Romana’s SEEDS FOR FUTURE MEMORIES – Voicing the Two Ends of Migration.
Funded by Villa Romana, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Senegal

INDEX:

Migration

Activism

Europe

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Mario Pfeifer

**Über Angst und Bildung, Enttäuschung und Gerechtigkeit, Protest und Spaltung in Sachsen / Deutschland, 2016-ongoing**

**Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear, 2015**

**Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear, 2014-2015**

**A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue & Epilogue, 2010**

**CODE UNKNOWN [Re_Sync], Notes on a film excerpt, 2010**

**The Los Angeles River-Project, 2009-2010**

**Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974/ 2009**

**Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008**

Biography

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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