𝓛𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝓪 𝓢𝓪𝓵𝓿𝓮 (𝓕𝓸𝓻 𝓪 𝓦𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓭) directed by Tereza Silon – a short film derived from an artistic/performance research, community queer & trans embodied storytelling workshops and exchanges with QTs in the Southern Bohemia region and beyond.
Production support on set by Iva Jedličková, Czech sign language interpreter on set by Zuzana Heřmanová (Tichý Svět), additional interpreter Tereza Holoubková (Tichý Svět)
Curator: Alena Kotyza
Special thanks for location availability: Alšova Jihočeská Galerie/Wortnerův Dům, Čajový Ateliér, Tady Kreativní Hub Thank you Mgr. Hynek Látall , Ph.D. for consultations on the Medieval Art collection. Thanks to Anna Davis and Lucie Boušková. supported by České Budějovice 2028 and Magic Carpets. Special mention goes to Budqueer.
In this stone you are bound, in time you are bound Break! a stone in two– lick its insides. This is the way to taste time Take a ruin, let it breathe, cut the weeds from hazelnut trees There is nothing new or old, only order and disorder. There is nothing new or old A stone shatters, eternity breaks. Geologic Sonification Tectonic Migration. Ex Nation Formation. Trans Stone As stone moves we move We could stop and rest here forever and yet we move
Contextual Mapping
WHERE ARE WE?
What we did find was something we were not looking for. We found something that could be considered the opposite of migration—we found stone. Everywhere, stone. We found and felt the geological magic of the the murgia—The Altopiano delle Murge—a karst topographic plateau. Ancient rocks have pushed up from under the sea, joining a once island sliver of land to the rest of the mainland. And yet in this land there is a movement, there is In Puglia we learn about Transhumance, which is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures. In montane regions (vertical transhumance), it implies movement between higher pastures in summer and lower valleys in winter … horizontal transhumance is more susceptible to being disrupted by climatic, economic or political change. (wikipedia)
In this land there is a road of pilgrimage, an ancient road of migration from the Rome to Jerusalem where travelers would traverse, stopping every 40 kilometers or so at another resnting point, “estacion del poste”.
These songs and sounds found in stone–suoni pietra–colors our entire journey and we carry it through.
It began when we arrived the first night at Giardina Diversensible in Ariana Urpina. There we discovered the magical sound and sensation garden built throughout the land, integrated into the hillsides. It came naturally to take our sound equipment and begin to play the instruments set throughout the land.
From the murgia in Puglia to the erupting Etna mountain above Catania; from the marble quarry in Apricena to the natural caves and eco-instruments in Ariana Urpina; from the powder released from a broken stone that the artist Vito Maiullari cracked and had us taste with our tongues (“this is the way to Touch Time” he said); to the stone streets paving every city. The stone is that which cannot move but manages to. It moves with horrific lethargy, terrifying slow-motion drama. Moves despite everything. And as Vito showed us—produces sound despite its density. We broke stones in two, and the two halves formed the half of eternity, and they formed the magic of time, of all time, tasting time. We began throughout all time bound, bound in stone and bound in the geology of the earth. And yet despite this, we MOVE. We must MOVE.
Yes this time our theme was something else, something that perhaps I did not intend, that I could not have embarked upon with intention.
It was Maria Teresa who may have first uttered the word recuperare when speaking about the vision of Ferula Ferita, the arts organization in the Old Station on the Antique Road. Recuperare recover, recuperate, regain. In relation to architecture, it means to take ruins, old run down spaces, unoccupied buildings, and make them functional again, even if just for a temporary amount of time. In relation to things it means to find old furniture, discarded bits of trash, and to refurbish them. In the way of land it means to pull away the weeds from nut trees and give them the chance to breathe again. It means both to scavenge and to reuse. It resists consumerism, resists the tendency to discard and build or buy anew. It resists the idea of supporting an economy where jobs are generated in order to make new things and we toil at making new things to buy new things to make new things.
Are you a musician who wants to deepen their practice in somatics? An activist who wants to explore field recording and the politics of sound? A performer, filmmaker, or artist who wants to create soundscapes for their works?
HYENAZ Techniques for Auditory Resistance is not only a workshop in sound design, electronic music production, and field recording, it is an invitation to create works of soundart shaped by the life-worlds of those who gather.
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For HYENAZ, sounds are also bodies: interconnected, multiple, animate. Neither mine nor yours, we encounter sound within a field of power. Through the embodied and unceasing practice of encountering sound as alive, HYENAZ have gathered countless techniques for un-thinking mastery over sound. This is an invitation to share these techniques with you and to invite you to considering the animacies of sound as you work with it as both material and agency.
With HYENAZ you will learn techniques to record the soundscapes and objects of the urban and natural environment, tactics for un/doing the extractive tendencies of artistic practices, methodologies for archiving and text writing, skills to mix and transform these sounds with an attitude of play using a DAW such as Bitwig or Ableton, and finally the confidence to give these works heft through experimental writing and movement exercises.
HYENAZ “Entanglements” is a VR experience that invites participants to explore their own entanglements with objects, landscapes, and extractive processes, with HYENAZ as their guide. In a fantastical environment—immersed in soundscapes and textures recorded through HYENAZ’s slow-movement research project Foreign Bodies—objects reveal their animacy, and participants are invited to engage in speculative storytelling to deepen their understanding of interrelationality.
Entanglements was part of the Culturhub Finland exhibition “Virtual Art House” (offline as of April 2026)
To access the work visit https://taiteentalo.fi/virtual-art-house/ ideally on a Chromium based browser. When you enter the space, turn your avatar 180 degrees and approach the grey orb to the left of the small walking robot. If you don’t see the orb yet, you may need to wait 1-2 minutes, depending on the speed of your internet connection. When you step inside the orb you will teleport into Entanglements.
With Animacies, HYENAZ stage their 10 years of Foreign Bodies research and musical compositions, giving them form through interactive performance scores developed during their 2023 residency at Hamburg’s Kampnagel theatre. These scores are interactive games in which audience members take the stage with HYENAZ and are invited to explore relationality and the micro-politics of inter-action; concepts HYENAZ explore in-depth throughout Foreign Bodies.
These scores operate as live co-creations: through which those gathered are challenged, for example, to think about proximit(ies) and how proximity affects our ability to take action towards care. Or, to experience the aliveness of the objects that populate psychic life–for instance, the phones breathing in our pockets, the scarves coiled around our neck–as well as the invisible relationships to other humans that condense within these objects – the many hands that follow an object from its origins as raw materials into the seemingly “finished” entity that we “own”. HYENAZ also invite their audience to sit with the (discomfort) of the micro-interactions we perform with each other in shared spaces as rehearsals of power.
The work refuses the tyranny of distancing, through which the aliveness of other entities vanishes beyond the horizon because we cannot physically experience them in our immediate environment. In what ways does proximity and distance make it possible for wars to continue without end, and for the satanic mills of capitalism to grind on into a cascade of mass extinction events.
These choreographies of care and complicity refuse the notion of presence and absence, action and passivity: we are always choosing to tune in or to tune out, to act or avoid. Tuning into the aliveness of objects–and of each other–is one way of returning a sense of radical responsibility to humans in a world that seems out of their control.
Introduction to the Animacy scores
An Animate Theatre PRactice
These texts for stage can be interpreted at will. They are not to be performed in any particular order or in any particular place. They are not all to be performed every time. The texts can be changed, they are dynamic, they are alive to us. We want to invite you to allow them to be alive to you. They are, and we are with them, a process; a flowing entity to which we enter. They are living texts, we hope. This is the hope that we have blown into them.
We know that no one can make something alive to another person. Perhaps the question of how to cultivate, facilitate and care for aliveness–a mutual commitment to and honoring of the life in each other–is at the heart of what might be called a “non-extractive creative process”. These texts contribute broadly to a dialogue about how to create such processes and the difficulties paramount in doing so. How do we work together across our unique intersectionalities, creating and maintaining relationships which resist extraction (of time, of money, of care, of commitment, of emotional labour, of joy, of ideas, of consent itself)? These texts intend to speak to, with, and about these questions without providing answers; these texts do not feel that they need to provide answers.
Extraction and its adjacent term extractivism is a wide concept, which could (perhaps) encompass many different kinds of actions and relationships. We are researching and relating to “extraction” as metasignifier—we include the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; minerals, gas and water from the ground; sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the special” from our very identities.
You might ask how is this any different from any other script. For one thing it is not directed by anyone except the participants. We will create and recreate it together. It is not the vision of the director, but the decision of those involved how it is shaped. This is also a critical pedagogy. It is also a process as soon as it is accepted by a production house / space / basement / backyard / public square. It is already a process, but when a house steps into the flow, the relationship begins to develop about how the players will be collected and who will play the audience and who will play the players and everything inbetween–interlocuters, active players, passive players. A sense of how a collaboration will be initiated is part of the ongoing conversation into which the house will step.
We have learned from previous performance work that performing the same ritual over and over can endanger one’s inner magic, especially when it is tied to performance sites where art and capitalism intersect–which is most sites of performance that have the priveldge of being so. That is why we have chosen to make this a hypertextual ritual with a modular structure, where pathways can be followed or left for nature to reclaim, so new paths can be discovered. It is, as you can see, also open to the public to witness and read.
We have a few hopes for our engagement in the process:
In this performance, we stay in touch with pleasure.
In this performance, we stay in touch with fears that cause resistance.
These texts are categorized in the following parts, which are by no means fixed or rigid: resources, scores, scenes, prose. It is entirely possible that a text changes its form and becomes another category, or be published twice, in two slightly different forms, under two different categories. It is also possible that new categories arise and are created, or that the system of categories is eliminated altogether. Our reasoning begind the categorizing system was to make some order for ourselves in terms of how we imagine staging this for the first time, and how bodies would orient to a given text based upon their category.
The idea of a score is a set of directions to be followed, as though the text is speaking to the participants. Participants attempt to interpret and follow the directions of the score, but essentially what they create will be a set of movements and speech acts that are not pre-recorded and will be entirely created in the moment by the unique set of people following the score. The speech can then be written down and recorded as text if the participants desire, and recorded, for example, as a scene.
A scene is a set of movement directions and speech acts which the participants, for the most part, repeat. The act of repetition of speech through the bodies who take the text across the dimension of time create the difference. Even if the scene were performd by the “same people” twice or three times, the difference would still be creation by the dimentiion of time and the fact of people changing through time. (We might, by that logic, ask if it really is the same people performing the text). The script of the scene, of course, can be changed, modified, but essentially the playing of the same scene more than one time is the act of repitiion and what we might think of as a vertical deepening of meaning, a way of finding new meaning in the same thing.
A bit of prose is similar to a scene, however the intention is that it is read by one body, and that body takes on the speech act for them/him/her self, meaning that they attempt to speak the text from the perspective of authorship, not as a representation of another’s text. They also dont engage directly with other bodies onstage; their relation is solely with the text. The text again acquires meeaning thorugh the act of repititiion, but the emphasis is on how one body relates to a text rather than how a field of bodies relate to a text. The challenge also arises in the way in which the mouth takes a text which “is not theirs” and speaks it, and owns it, or claims it from the perspective of “I”.
Resources are not necessarily meant to be (re)presented onstage, though they can be. They are meant to be informative to the structure of the text itself, like this document. They are also meant to act in concert with the texts.
Finally, these texts for stage desire to be much more than what they can be, and this is a painful desire. This desire is a kind of dysphoria, a dysphoria that one feels or is interpreted as weak but is actually powerful, of being able to effect change, to be able to make the change happen together. The dysphoria is that the texts have to not be works of art but rather to be political acts, to be legislation, to be unions. They also call to act bodies who desire to be much more than what they are, and to be understood to be more more than how they are visualized by each other. They would like to be asked what they imagine to be and use the stage as a place experiment as something(s) they imagine themeslves to be. And i—script—- i living script—i desire to be something larger than what i can be, to affect more change than what i can affect. Perhaps not to be script, but to be a union of artists, of workers. To be a union of persons who do not have to claim art as a distinctive category. What a beautiful idea.
In 2024, HYENAZ completed the final sections of their monumental ten-year slow movement journey FOREIGN BODIES, a sonic and political exploration of management and control of bodies, and their embodied resistance. Inviting numerous collaborators, academics, and artists to contribute their reflections, HYENAZ wove voice notes, raw field recordings, and interview highlights into atmospheric tracks which come inbetween the dance tracks. These are each sonic works that exposes the skeletal structures of sound and process.
The album and live work are made possible through the contributions of an extraordinary network of artists, scholars, and communities, including:
• Sylbee Kim (multidisciplinary artist) • Sivan Ben Yishai (playwright, writer) • Thomas F. DeFrantz (scholar, choreographer) • Mmakgosi Kgabi (performance artist, actor) • Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau (filmmaker, performer, researcher) • Rodrigo Frenk (sound artist, experimental musician) • Tereza Silon (performance artist, body worker) • Imre Szeman (cultural theorist, energy humanities) • Erin Manning (philosopher, movement researcher) • Wayne Atkinson (Yorta Yorta elder, historian) • Ambra Stucchi (bodyworker, dancer, healer) • Danilo Andres (choreographer, dancer) • Vito Maiulari (artist, sculptor, sound researcher) • Yusuph Suso (kora musician) • Bartłomiej Kuźniak (saxophonist, bassist, producer) • Donato Laborante (poet, storyteller, performer) • attendees of the Anarcho-Feminist & Anti-Military Conference • Lorca Miziolek (contributor) • Choirs and nonhuman sounds • Samothraki Sounds • KUBA • Yorta Yorta Community • RKK & Grand-Synthe Camp, Dunkirk • Barmah Lakes
HYENAZ’s research for Inbetweens was made possible by a STIP-III stipendium from Musikfonds, which supported their final compositions for the Foreign Bodies series and their exploration of the sonic potential of stone. A pivotal moment in this research was a journey to the Murgia region of Italy, where they documented interviews with artists, historians, storytellers, biologists, and speleologists, further expanding the sonic and conceptual depth of the project.
Welcome to a living room that turns into a smouldering scene of remembering and forgetting. Here, between a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her daughter, worlds collide: an interplay of anger, sadness, despair and disorientation. What remains when memories fade and the past becomes an unreliable companion?
Damage Done takes the audience on a journey through the fragility of memory and the construction of identity in a world that wants to save everything. The starting point is private video recordings from the family archive that were never intended for the public. But it is precisely this intimate closeness that challenges us to pause and ask questions: What does this material show – and what does it do to us who view it?
Through a collaborative process, the recordings are dissected, reinterpreted and translated into images, movements and dialogues. Alternative forms of communication emerge, transforming the stage into a multi-perspective space in which remembering and forgetting are negotiated in equal measure.
Expressing desire, pursuing dreams, loving oneself, questioning the oppressive confines of patriarchy. Farida Baqi takes us on a lyrical and emotional journey through the life of a young woman from birth to adulthood in an unnamed Arab city.
The moment of birth, the possibilities of childhood, the growing pains of teenage years, the expectations imposed by society on young women: The Visual Feminist Manifesto explores how a woman’s life is crafted by the world around her. We are witness to the ways in which she makes meaning, both from her personal experience and how she is told she must behave, both deeply shaped by patriarchal structures. Repeatedly told that women are “less than”, her behaviour is made small by the threats of shame, fear, and ostracisation. All the while, she is seeking something more emancipatory.
Farida Baqi brings us into the fold through the life of an unnamed woman in an Arab city, homing in on the experience of a cisgender woman making encounters with heterosexual desire. But the filmmaker’s ode will resonate with many, united through universal emotions of joy, pain, love, and frustration.
Contrasting shots depicting the urbanity of an Arab city and the gentle scenery of the seaside, Baqi makes a woman’s life inextricable from the spaces and places around her, all the while hinting at a more liberatory future forged through solidarity.
Credits
Director
Farida Baqi
Music
Mad Kate | the Tide, HYENAZ, Lynn Adib
Sound Design
Studio Mitte, HYENAZ
Screenplay
Farida Baqi
Cinematography
Janne Ebel
Principal cast
Amal el-Hani, Lynn Adib, Rosalie Cella, Gaël Abou Jaoude, Michelle Zallouaa, Norah Toledano, Alice Canzonieri
In Audibility, HYENAZ delve into the politics of sound, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship to the audible and inaudible, to silence and silencing. Recorded in an ancient man-made cave in the Murgia region of southern Italy, poet Donato Laborante cradles a stalk of Ferula Ferita, his fingers tracing the the fibrous plant ubiquitous to these regions as he delivers an exposition on the different forms of silence. For Laborante, silence is not absence – it is an event.
The sung text which follows–eery, gutteral, raw–connects the silence of spaces to the absence of certain speaking bodies from discourse. It compels the willingness of the listener to hear differently; to tune into those voices which are absent, to make absence something worth listening to. This is not about giving voice to the voiceless, of incorporating unheard voices into already established patterns of speech and articulation (and their relavent hierarchies). Audibility dreams of a kind of sensory co-practice not yet realised where silence is not a void, but a dynamic and multifaceted presence.
IT’S LOVER, LOVE – Wake for Lost Ones, Xposed Film Festival, Aquarium, Berlin
In 2022, director Yony Leyser asked HYENAZ to develop a sound design for his film The Fourth Generation, which starred and was loosely based/not based on the life-force that is Aérea Negrot—singer, producer, DJ, and performer. One morning, Aérea joined us in our studio to help create an auditory mood for the film’s peak, where the protagonist places a cartoonish ticking time-bomb at the feet of Germany’s newly elected dictator.
Image by Xposed Queer Film Festival
Aérea took to the microphone and, over twenty or thirty minutes, unleashed a torrent of sounds, tones, voices—an overflow, a rupture that was beautiful, stirring, and at times unsettling. We took only what served the film and parked the rest in our deep memories.
In 2023, Aérea died.
For the 2024 edition of the Xposed Film Festival, a memorial for Aérea was arranged by Shu Lea Chang, Jürgen Brüning, and Alex Demitriou, who worked with Aérea on a number of Shu Lea’s films. Seeing the call for contributions, we returned to the material from the film and presented it at the wake.
Kate remembered that there was more, a great deal more, than what we had used in the film. We opened the project in our DAW and stretched out the audio track, discovering an extended crescendo in which the text “Pain can be a place of future transformation” emerged.
At times, the words sound like a prayer, at others a demand.
We arranged Aérea’s voice in layers interspersed with drones formed by stretching out her syllables. Finally, with gentle chords and a melody, Aérea asks the listener to chant the mantra with her into infinity.
Perimeter is an audio visual work and interactive documentary by HYENAZ, featuring performances by Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Martini Cherry Furter and Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau. It asks the question: what does it feel like to understand oneself as “just outside” and yet also “just barely inside” an identity, a concept, a philosophy, a group, a family, a home, a situation, a gathering? What is the feeling of just barely belonging? Both inside and outside? What is it like to be “foreign” to a place which is familiar? What is foreign inside?
Exhibited at Utrecht’s 2022 Come Alive exhibition on sexualities and eroticism, it maps psychic borderlands through five performers confronting their own thresholds.
Adrienne Teicher navigates the perimeter of her semi-discarded Jewishness, while Mad Kate grapples with the dissonance between an assigned-female body and a nonbinary selfhood. Mmakgosi Kgabi gazed into her complex and distanced relationship with the feeling of joy, and Martini Cherry Furter oscillates between the “authentic” and performed persona. Finally, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, who lives between Germany and Columbia, chose the perimeter of the peripheric body and the intersecting lines of race, gender and class present across the hemispheres of their homes.
At its core lies a meticulously edited music video—art-directed by Yeorg Kronnagel, cinematography by Robert Mleczko—where the artists perform these unstable territories. Their movements, raw yet stylized, reveal how play and trauma coexist in interstitial spaces. The track’s industrial thrum channels Berlin’s underground techno scene, a shared habitat for all five collaborators.
During the Come Alive exhibition, audiences could access a virtual documentary on their phones in which five concurrent interview screens lay bare the origins of the spectacle. It was in these interviews that the performers uncovered the uneasy territories within their identities, describe in raw detail aspects of themselves which normally lie beneath the surface of awareness. This offered viewers a rare insight into the unglamorous scaffolding of Berlin’s queer performance ecology.
The soundscape stitches together sonic fragments of displacement: a metal fence scraped on Samothraki’s windswept hills; chatter from a Palermo café; the clatter of a Dunkirk refugee kitchen; Bartłomiej Kuzniak’s saxophone echoing through Czestochowa’s ancient caves; Alex Spree’s clarinet warped into synthetic whispers. Each sample carries the weight of its origin.
Accompanying the installation, the Perimeter EP features HYENAZ’s original composition alongside remixes by IXA and Maya Postepski aka Princess Century.
Queering Audibility is a collaboration between deaf performance artist Eyk Kauly and the hearing sound artists HYENAZ. Together they explore how artists can use the entirety of their physical and affective sensorium to create new works and to challenge the conditions through which audibility comes into being.
In this open rehearsal, the audience is invited to engage with the following questions: How does embodied performance and sign language inspire the creation of soundscapes? How does sound translate – with the help of sign language interpreters – into bodily experiences? Can sounding performance and performing sound help (re)imagine the perceived binary of Deaf and hearing, or other binaries? How are those bound to hearing, being heard and what does queering mean in the context of this audibility?
HYENAZ would like thank the Imaginando who donated VS (Visual Synthesizer) to the project. VS is an exciting tool that can create visuals from audio or midi signals. You can learn more about VS here: https://www.imaginando.pt/products/vs-visual-synthesizer
This amphibious work extrapolates from field recordings of an immense frog chorus encountered by HYENAZ on Yorta Yorta Country in southeastern Australia. The frogs reacted to the artists’ presence and movement by modulating their vocalizations’ intensity and volume, generating an organic techno pulse. PROXIMITY’s singular texture emerges from this interspecies collaboration with wetland wildlife.
The amphibians’ responses to perceived [in]security led HYENAZ to draw parallels between ecological reactivity and human social dynamics—a concept visceralized in the track’s slime-coated video. The visual work lurches across bodies in motion to ask: “Does Our Proximity Bind Us?”
Proximity was first published in Interim 35.2 – The Body Issue in April 2018. Movement research for PROXIMITY originated in HYENAZ’s Proximate Movements praxis, first developed during Isabelle Lewis’s immersive spaces exploration at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau as part of Welt Ohne Aussen festival in 2018. Later iterations at Garbicz Festival involved collaborators Ambrita Sunshine, Adrienne Teicher, Mad Kate, Federica Dauri, Danilo Andrés, Bishop Black, and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau. This research eventually coalesced into CLUSTERFUCK, the collective HYENAZ directed for PEACHES’ There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle.
PROXIMITY was remixed by Dorninger, okpk, El Fulminador and The Shredder
The track’s genesis proved revelatory. While camping at Barmah Lakes on Yorta Yorta Country—invited by Elder Professor Wayne Atkinson to learn his community’s cosmology and ongoing sovereignty struggles—HYENAZ documented twilight’s descent. As darkness pooled across waterways, extraterrestrial clicks and pulses emerged, seemingly mapping space through sound. Venturing into marshes with recorders, the duo found sounds retreating from their approach like negative force fields. Only upon stillness did the source reveal itself: tiny frogs throbbing in torchlight, their chorus swelling as HYENAZ surrendered pursuit.
This encounter underscored HYENAZ’s belief that field recording demands sensitivity over mastery. The frogs dictated terms of cohabitation, teaching the artists that creation often involves undoing—a radical receptivity to nonhuman agency.
The experience also catalyzed HYENAZ’s inquiry into proximity’s paradoxes: how safety and grievability (the capacity to mourn lives) fluctuate with physical nearness; how alternative proximities might forge care networks beyond geography. For the PROXIMITY video, HYENAZ collaborated with dancers Adrienne Teicher, Bishop Black, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Danilo Andrés, and ROC to choreograph closeness’s visceral grammar.
As the inaugural work in HYENAZ’s Foreign Bodies series—encompassing mixed-reality performances and A/V installations—PROXIMITY exemplifies their practice of learning from communities resisting bodily control by nation-states and capital.
One hot summer night in New Orleans a drag collective staged wrestling night. They dressed up as their vibrant alter-egos, and proceeded to beat the living daylights out each other while the audience collectively lost their shit. That night, Chokehole was born. This documentary follows Chokehole as they take the show to Germany, sharing the stories of cast members as they grapple with racism, gender conformism, queer identity and America’s suppression of the arts.
The film depicts the artists both with and without drag, sharing their larger-than-life and theatrical alter egos while displaying the unique vulnerabilities that lie behind the character. This film explores their loud, vibrant personas alongside their heart-breaking personal stories, and the adversity they’ve had to overcome to be accepted in the US. As the documentary progresses, we learn how each character copes with love, sex, transitions, post-trauma, and socioeconomics while offering a glimpse into their fantastical, vivid world… which is as much an escape for the artists as it is for the audience.
“Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers do Deutschland” is the story of how disenfranchised, queer performers defeated all the odds to make a compelling theatrical show.
Chokehole screened at New Orleans Film Festival, Outfest and Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Stillicidum: die Tränen des Steines (The Tears of the Stone) reveals how landscapes inscribe themselves onto the senses—through pressure, vibration, and the body’s negotiation with forces that predate and outlast it.
In the limestone amphitheater of Poggiorsini’s quarry, participants became “weather vanes”, conduits for the stone’s ancient animacy—its latent capacity to act and be acted upon. Following the choreographic score by HYENAZ, participants held and adapted their bodies to channel the energies they encountered, forging a taut circuit between sound and affect.
On the banks of the toxic sulfur lake La Mefite di Rocca San Felice, the workshop unfolded as a procession. Led by ritualists through a liminal landscape whose noxious gases are fatal to those who linger too long (yet do not allow bodies to decompose), participants traversed the border between living and non-living. Amid vapors bubbling from the earth, those present attuned to the tense symbiosis of life and death within their own organisms and psychologies.
The Fourth Generation, is a homage to Berlin’s vibrant underground and the communities that breathe life into the city. The film is set in a dystopian future, but the themes explored are very real. Queer identity, feminism, sexuality and the intersection of politics and art. In the near future Professional provocateur and artist Maven Shegula has returned to Berlin after a hiatus in Zürich. She’s back to celebrate her 50th birthday, and to appear on a popular German talk show.
As she wanders the streets of Berlin with her girlfriend and friend, it becomes apparent that being an artist in this city is no longer acceptable. The humming nightlife has disappeared, and the vibrant creative community pushed to the margins of society. The film is alive with tension, both sexual and otherwise. As Maven’s story unfurls on live television, we learn about her son, her politics, her heritage and her alter-ego Rosa who champions radical self-expression and feminism. The interview is dispersed with beautiful and volcanic eruptions from Maven that act as both a denunciation of the city’s leadership and a love letter to Berlin.
Packed full of vibrant fashion, queerness, dark humour and experimental visuals, The Fourth Generation depicts every artists worst nightmare – and the lengths one woman will go to stand by what she believes in. The film features a predominantly trans and non-binary cast.
Credits
Directed and Written by
Yony Leyser
Sound Design
Hyenaz (Kathryn Fischer & Adrienne Teicher)
Cast
Aerea Negrot, Gigi Spelsberg, Yvon Jansen, Daniel Zillmann, Mano Thiravong, Mathea Hoffmann, Chilly Gonzales
Ex Situ is a collaborative project between HYENAZ, Gambian griot descendant Yusuph Suso, with technical assistance from Lau Bau and Rodrigo Frenk. The work manifests as an audiovisual sculpture, generative music video, and evolving interactive artwork accessible via smartphone or laptop—a cartography of the fragile technological threads tethering transdimensional lives across past, present, and future homelands.
The sculpture’s core comprises a levitating network of scratched mobile phones counterbalanced in midair. Each device loops randomized audiovisual fragments, generating an ever-shifting musical narrative. This kinetic architecture draws inspiration from Maxine Burkett’s “Nation Ex-Situ” concept, which advocates for the associative rights of diasporic peoples which highlights the rights to association of the growing number of people who have lost the physical location of their former homes, but who maintain bonds nonetheless as they roam across disparate locations.
From their Foreign Bodies research, HYENAZ observed how human beings in movement often orbit clusters of phones and power banks—digital hearths glowing with the embers of family and memory. Our devices locate us where we come from, where we are, and where we are going.
In Ex Situ, these devices carry imagery and audio of Suso, whom the collective met en route to a Sicilian detention center. A former refugee, Suso was there to act as an interpreter for migrants navigating the bureaucratic intricacies of the Italian migration system. WIthin moments, Suso shared his identity as a griot, a descendant from a long lineage of court musicians stretching back to the Malian empire.
Following this serendipitous encounter, the trio recorded interviews and vocals in Mandinka and English. Suso later shared smartphone footage from Gambia—raw materials HYENAZ transmuted into sonic/visual shards distributed across the suspended phones. The work invites global contributors to add migration stories via digital interfaces, asserting free movement as both human right and survival imperative.
As gallery installation, video EP (featuring a Sky Deep remix), and participatory web platform, Ex Situ draws us into a collective hive of dreams and memories, that the drive to phone home persists even as lifeworlds sink, dissolve, or are displaced.
Credits
Text & Vocals
Yusuph Suso
Music and Concept
Hyenaz
Sculpture Design
Lau Bau
Videography
Yusuph Suso
Video Edit
Hyenaz
Creative Code
Rodrigo Frenk
Remix
Sky Deep
Supported by
Musikfonds, Neustart Kultur, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
The reading group prioritizes collective close reading as a deliberate counterpractice to Western academic hegemony, linguistic hierarchies, and the artificial divide between institutional and non-institutional knowledge. Sessions require no long-term commitment, centering accessibility for artists and workers excluded from academic resources or time-intensive research. Non-native speakers are supported through collaborative translation and definition.
The project interrogates how extractive dynamics—environmental (mineral/gas/water exploitation), intellectual (appropriation of ideas, sounds, labor), and aesthetic (“mining the for branding for branding)—permeate sonic and performative arts. It asks: How do hierarchical collaborations normalize extraction? Can such processes resist their own dynamics? What are the framework’s limits? How might reciprocal artist-subject-nature relations emerge?
Methodology
Participants select a text (chapter or excerpt) to read collectively during sessions, rejecting preparatory labor. Dialogue prioritizes utility for members’ real-world work over academic abstraction, resisting institutional pressures by centering non-academics. The group fosters engagement with critical theory outside traditional academic spaces, emphasizing lived experience over performative expertise.
In myth, Medusa is raped by the god of the sea, after which she transforms into a winged figure with serpent hair, whose gaze turns anyone to stone. Medusa’s violent, kaleidoscopically structured memoirs in Sivan Ben Yishai’s work are a dedication to all lovers, cataloging moments of our collective memory: between desire and violence, between porn and sexual fantasies, between political attacks and familial complicity in looking away. In a seemingly contrasting scenario, five young girls collectively imagine the dream man of their future, involuntarily casting themselves as perfect attributes by his side. On a third narrative thread, the author drafts a literal reversal dynamic of traditional storytelling patterns:
A woman picks up a knife, leaves the crime scene of the marital bed, hijacks a crowded bus, and shifts into reverse gear to collect century-old storylines and all the battered human love-flesh, decomposing them. Could it not become humus for an eco-sphere of feminist narratives?
All proceeds from Bandcamp sales benefit perfocraZe International Artist Residency, Kumasi, Ghana. The founder of perfocraZe, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artisT is one of the most courageous and inspiring artists/activists we have ever met. sHit founded and leads the incredible international artist residency in Kumasi Ghana and is a beacon of light as a courageous queer person, performer, speaker, truth teller. sHit also works tirelessly fighting for LGBTQI+ rights in Ghana.
Methodology
The field recordings and visual materials for Eku Eku Eku (a call to death) were gathered on the 20th of April 2021 at 14:00 CET / 12:00 GMT simultaneously in Berlin, Germany and Kumasi, Ghana. Using a deep listening methodology that HYENAZ had previously developed during the course of their first Virtual Partner Residency with Detroit-based artist Jova Lynne, both partners spent one hour making a parallel ritualistic and performative journey in their respective cities: Berlin and Kumasi, which were documented by their videographers.
Prior to the day of the performance, we made several calls to form what would be the central theme to our work, finally deciding on a meditation with death. Death has been and will always be a central theme for the living, but this year due to the global pandemic, meditating on death seemed particularly poignant. HYENAZ decided to enact their end of the ritual in the Wedding Crematorium, at Silent Green while Va-Bene created her performance in one of Kumasi’s cemeteries.
We decided on the color of red for our project in order to further unify our journeys. Once we were dressed and prepared, we called each other to check in before beginning. At the end of our respective rituals, we made a call again, discovering that we had completed our rituals within minutes of each other.
We followed this deep listening score for the simultaneous ritual:
Grounding. Find a comfortable position where you can relax your body into the location. Think about grounding. If you feel comfortable, come as physically close to the ground as possible. Lie on the ground. Let whatever parts of your body that touch the ground sink deeper into the ground. Concentrate on rooting. Capture the ambient sounds located there. Film yourself in this space, becoming grounded. Move the camera very close to your body to get some of the sounds and sensations very close to your skin and to your body against the earth.
Deep Listening. While letting the recording run, think about the sound that you hear. What sounds do you hear closest to you? What is more distant? What is even further away? Take note. You can also move your body in small micro-orientations to signal that you receive the sound. It could be an arm movement or a very subtle shift in your weight, depending on how you are positioned. Articulations. From this grounded space, what words come to mind. Try not to edit yourself. Just say the first words that come to mind. Say them outloud so that they are captured by the camera and microphone. Don’t worry at first about capturing a good recording, just let the words flow. Once you know what they are, repeat the same words again clearly into the microphone/camera.
Colour. What colour association do you make or feel as you occupy this space? Does the colour have a sound? Does the mood produced by the colour have a sound? Make a sound offering into the microphone, a squeal, song, gurgle, scream … be free Immediate concentric circle. Stand up and take space. From this specific place, take your camera and move slowly around your location in 360 degrees. This is the immediate circle and site of “home”. Move slowly so that you can notice details around you. Then take the camera and have someone move around you in 360 degrees to get you from all sides.
Mapping. Travel with your mind in concentric circles starting with the closest circle and moving out further and further like the skin of an onion. Name what is there and what it means for you, what is its significance, personal, political, contemporary, historical, futurological.
Found instrument. Find two objects within and around this site which can produce distinct sound and “play”. For instance, a wire scraped on a bench, or a tin can on the cement ground. Play your instrument while the recorder is set on the ground in a set location and record for at least 2 minutes. Let yourself record both distinct “hits” of the instrument as well as experiments in rhythm. Film yourself playing this instrument Free
Movement. As you have called into all directions the sounds and energies, begin to let your body move freely in response. Try to film your movements from different directions. Allow any sounds that rise to emerge from your body. Interact with the space and its objects in any way you feel compelled to.
Lyrics
(sung by Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] in Ewe) Mother mother mother / Na Na na, Naye Nayee Nayee If you reach the peak of the mountain Agou and hear any voice, you know that I’m the one calling you / Ne do Agou toa nu de maa ne se gbedidia de, nanya be nye le yor wo Death doesn’t like good things / Eku me nya nu nyui ooo Death doesn’t kill wicked people / Eku me wua amevodi wo Death doesn’t pity poor people / Eku me kpor nublanui ne ame dahe woo Death doesn’t know good things / Eku me nya nu nyui ooo Death doesn’t know beauty things / Eku menya tungbe oo Death doesn’t know wealth / Eku me nya hotsuioooo Death has caused us a lot / Eku wo nu mi Death has wounded our heart / Ekue dabi miafe dzi nu Death doesn’t say it will go and come / Eku megblor be me yi ma vao
Editing Technique
Key to the emergence of the a/v work Eku Eku Eku was the experimental cutting techniques through which HYENAZ edited and assembled the piece. Normally we begin by composing a work from field recordings, and then cut the video to match this audio work. This time we worked from the video first using a modified version of the JAWA technique developed by the artist Tasman Richardson. When Tasman Richardson creates a/v works, they begin with found footage, scrubbing, cutting and looping to create percussive sounds and melodies using only the audio and visual material present in each fragment of found footage. We attempted the same, utilizing the audio visual field recordings we had each gathered, building the audio and visual composition in one step, from only the sounds and images present in each fragment.
This process resulted in a composition with an extremely tight relationship between picture and sound, content and form, and allowed us to merge the worlds of Va Bene’s ritual performance in Kumasi and ours in Berlin. However, it was not without challenges: We struggled with the sheer number of audio and visual tracks layered on top of each other. Creating music within a NLE like DaVinci Resolve, which is designed primarily for video editing, lends a fragility to the creative process, a careless key stroke can easily change the relationship between vast amounts of audio and visual material and undermine days of work. In the end we exported the audio stems from the video and worked with them in our DAW Bitwig to finalize the composition and to process and add effects to some of the sounds that were lacking presence in their raw form. We then reconnected the audio and visual before exporting the final work.
Automine asks: what are bodies worth in the digital age? And answers this question through a performance of the performance through which bodies create value, for themselves, but most likely for others.
Bodies create value through physical labour, bodies create value by emotional labour, bodies also create value by mining the identifying markers attached to bodies, my gender, my sexuality, my story, all of these markers have value, but the value of these markers change through space and time, as society changes, as politics changes, and as the body changes, ages, decays.
As the virtual replaces the real, the body should disappear. But does it really? Automine seeks an answer through, music, essay and a critical recitation of queer aesthetics in the third decade of the twenty first century.
Image: Mirek Fokt
HYENAZ present their musical works as immersive performance intervention. A performance asks that bodies are present: as performer, as audience, as active interlocutor. The assembling of bodies together for the purpose of performance – and the proximity of those bodies to experience or create together – is in itself a practice of (re)discovery of the politics of sharing physical space and the immanent territory of the flesh.
AUTOMINE pushes their ongoing Foreign Bodies project deeper into questions around a/Arts and extractivism, where “extraction” is utilized as metasignifier for the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; the mining of minerals, gas and water from the ground; the taking and recording of sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the seemingly consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the exotic” from our very identities.
membra(I)nes: 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
Signals explores the notion of performativity in the form of codes, signs, drag, and masks in order to emerge from the darkness as visible.
Signals become methods of translation, channels through which our voices become audible and understood. Bodies emerge into forms which are recognized and codified; modes through which we can be understood and called into subjectivity. An audio work and a video essay, Signals explores the process of emergence especially as it relates to the a/Artist into cultural spaces of power, those who hold or desire to hold the microphone.
Using multiple distinct voices and perspectives, both sung and written, Signals explores the process through which one emerges through the implementation of signals like masks, codes, dress, and language in order to achieve audibility, visibility and thus access. What is this process of emergence? Who stands at the gate? What is gained and lost in this process?
HYENAZ create all their sound works from original field recordings; the particular context for these recordings were an anarcha-feminist anti-military conference which brought together activists from throughout and beyond Eastern Europe and central Asia. Together the members of the conference struggled to bridge knowledges, contexts and experiences. HYENAZ want to especially thank the voices and brave activists who were present there.
Signals is the 4th audio visual work in Foreign Bodies, commissioned by Sound Scene Festival, Washington DC in 2021, with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Goethe Institut.
Körper Figurationen Welten introduces queer studies as a transdisciplinary research field in an intersectional way. The interplay of power and desire causes physical, mental and emotional movements in space and time. According to queer theory, these can solidify into domination, sometimes even take on violent forms; but they can also cause attraction, unexpected connections and movements, forms of pleasurable encounters or intimacy. Queer theory is power analysis and criticism of domination, which faces the contradicting challenge of criticizing difference as social inequality, but promoting it as uniqueness and particularity. The videos test experimental formats and queer aesthetics. Because the question of what is presented is directly related to the question of how it is presented. As is shown, in turn refers to possibilities and limits that are open to the imagination and desire or are set.
The videos are freely available as Open Educational Resources at the following link: e.feu.de/queer-theory-videos
Foreign Bodies is a sonic and somatic exploration of bodies in multiplicity: bodies in motion and migration; bodies managed by internal and external forces; bodies navigating boundaries imposed by others, bodies negotiating boundaries they set for themselves; bodies in flux; bodies in synchronicity; bodies in resistance to management and control. Since 2015, we have met and worked with so many incredible people to make this project come alive. In 2025, we began staging Foreign Bodies as a series called, “Animacies,” which has synthesised this ten year long work into live interactive performance scores, each one slightly different from the other depending on the context. On 17 May 2026, we released the full album, which you can purchase to support our ongoing work.
Foreign Bodies initially emerged as a response to paranoid narratives around migration into Europe, Australia, and the United States—different locations in which HYENAZ’s constructed versions of “home”. What truly interests HYENAZ is how movement continually reshapes subjectivity, and how subjectivity, in turn, dictates both how bodies move and how bodies are allowed to move.
While some traverse borders as unchecked tourists, others risk death to migrate—a brutal asymmetry so utterly normalized that it is easy to forget that there is nothing normal about it at all. It has a history, it has a structure, it has interests, and it is these contingencies and determinations that HYENAZ wish to map.
Foreign Bodies likewise interrogates the very notion of the “foreign,” whether weaponized through xenophobic fear or inadvertently perpetuated through allyship that exoticizes the Other. HYENAZ seek to trace the ways we produce the unknowable subject within our own communities and even within our own bodies
HYENAZ work through field recordings – materialisations of time, people and places, which, when played back, produce temporary sound sculptures in the air, and from these fragments the duo creates artworks probing authority, consent, and proximity. Their itinerant research—via trains, buses, bicycles, and hitchhiking—led them to migrant camps, transit zones, communes, and artist colonies, over the course of ten years.
These inquiries have expanded beyond initial scope, compelling HYENAZ to examine how humans construct the Otherness of fellow beings—whether human, animal, plant, or stone, and how that attitude binds or unbinds the self to experience the world in all its senses.
Works
CREDITS
This album began in 2015 at a temporary camp for asylum seekers outside Budapest, Hungary and ended in 2024 at the Pro-Palestinian “Occupy Against Occupation” Camp in Berlin, Germany
Composition, Field RecorDING, Studio Recording, A/V Concept and Editing, PERFORMANCE:
Jo Pollux (Proximity) Raja de Luna (Proximity) Robert Mleczko (Perimeter) Xenia Østergård Ramm and Old Erik at Hackstage Collective (Columns)
STYLISTS and COSTUMES:
Juan de Chamié (Perimeter, live) Yeorg Kronnagel (Perimeter, live) Moran Sanderovich (live)
INSTALLATION ARTISTS:
Lau Licciardi (Designer, Builder) Rodrigo Frenk (Creative Technologist)
SPECIAL THANKS:
Giuseppe Bottalico and his two sons, Ion Dumitrescu, Cosima, Mihaela Cirjan, Graham Ball at Orchestral Tools, Nora Ugron, Lilly Pfalzer, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, Jova Lynne, Isabelle Lewis, Sharon and Micha at KUBA, AntkeAntek Engel, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Donato Laborante, Michele Melchionda, Franx Ciava, Barbara Maraio, Lea Connert and team at Kampnagel, Dana Tucker, Maria Teresa Natuzzi, Annibale Sepe, Nadia Says at Your Mom’s Agency, attendees of the Anarcho-Feminist & Anti-Military Conference, activists at Besetzung gegen Besatzung, Wayne Atkinson (Yorta Yorta elder, historian), PEACHES, Ellison Glenn, Hanna Schaich, Yony Leyser, Interim Magazine, Rainer Scheerer at SPRINGSTOFF, Emerencz at Obskur Music, Nick Cullen, Thomas Chambon, Laura Hester, Graphijane, and our families
On October 3, 1938, just before Pogrom Night, the city of Dortmund ordered the city’s Great Synagogue to be torn down. On October 3rd, 2020, just a few meters from the square of the Old Synagogue, the city theater opened its season with this text. After Munich and Berlin, the writer Sivan Ben Yishai is performing her text in a special collaboration with the duo HYENAZ: “Our city from bird’s eyes / bleeding in the dark”. The performative, musical reading is a meditation on the 35 days of repentance, which lie between October 3 and November 9, and draws an arc from the past to the future.
For Beyond Possible, HYENAZ and Jova Lynne gathered field recordings and visual materials in Berlin and Detroit during July and August 2020, with the intention of finding and creating sanctuary. Each took a parallel journey in each of our cities, making three stops: 1-Fire/Hearth, 2-Water and 3-Cosmos. In each of these stations tgey used the following methodology for gathering our sound and visual samples:
Methodology
Grounding. Find a comfortable position where you can relax your body into the location. Think about grounding. If you feel comfortable, come as physically close to the ground as possible. Lie on the ground. Let whatever parts of your body that touch the ground sink deeper into the ground. Concentrate on rooting. Put your sound device on the ground and mm press record. Capture the ambient sounds located there.
Deep Listening. While letting the recording run, think about the sound that you hear. What sounds do you hear closest to you? What is more distant? What is even further away? Take note. You can also move your body in small micro-orientations to signal that you receive the sound. It could be an arm movement or a very subtle shift in your weight, depending on how you are positioned.
Articulations. From this grounded space, what words come to mind. Try not to edit yourself. Just say the first words that come to mind. Say them outloud so that they are captured by the device. Don’t worry at first about capturing a good recording, just let the words flow. Once you know what they are, pick up your sound recorder and say the same words again clearly into the microphone.
Colour. What colour association do you make or feel as you occupy this space? Does the colour have a sound? Does the mood produced by the colour have a sound? Make a sound offering into the microphone, a squeal, song, gurgle, scream … be free Immediate concentric circle. From this specific place, take your camera and move slowly around your location in 360 degrees. This is the immediate circle and site of “home”. Move slowly so that you can notice details around you.
Concentric Circles. Travel with your mind in concentric circles starting with the closest circle and moving out further and further like the skin of an onion. Name what is there and what it means for you, what is its significance, personal, political, contemporary, historical, futurological.
First sound. Leaving the center of your circle, go towards one of the sounds that you noticed during your deep listening. Get as close as possible to it and press record. Try to record that sound for at least 2 minutes without interruption and, if possible, without ambient interruptions
Found instrument. Find two objects within and around this site which can produce distinct sound and “play”. For instance, a wire scraped on a bench, or a tin can on the cement ground. Play your instrument while the recorder is set on the ground in a set location and record for at least 2 minutes. Let yourself record both distinct “hits” of the instrument as well as experiments in rhythm.
The 2020 edition of the Droste Festival features a dialogic project between authors Sivan Ben Yishai and Maren Kames. These two incisive voices of a younger literary generation interrogate war, peace, and their transhistorical entanglement with language, engaging Droste’s legacy as both interlocutor and spectral collaborator. The project is produced by and features HYENAZ, who weave sonic architecture and filmic praxis into the discourse as well as performing in the work.
HYENAZ’s COLUMNS confronts the violence of historical curation—the way militarized power and historiographic gatekeepers enshrine “events” and “personae” while erasing those deemed inconsequential. The track’s industrial techno veneer belies its organic origins: vocalizations and percussion recorded in a limestone cave near Poland’s pilgrimage nexus, Czestochowa, in collaboration with saxophonist Bartlomiej Kuzniak. Part of their Foreign Bodies series, the work shapeshifts field materials gathered in refugee camps, migrant transit zones, and pilgrimage routes—sites where bodies are surveilled, regulated, and obliterated.
Released via Canadian label OBSKUR MUSIC with remixes by Lady Maru, Bad Conscience, Consumer Refund, and NVRS, COLUMNS is paired with a video collaboration between HYENAZ, Xenia Østergård Ramm, and Hackstage collective’s Old Erik. Using analog glitch processing, the visuals decompose footage of Harz Mountain stalactites, skeletal trees, and whirring turbines—a digital entropy mirroring the track’s themes of historical disintegration.
The vocals functions as a choral palimpsest. Its evocation of decomposing leaves and scattered bodies rhizomatically connects to the video’s destabilized geometries: HYENAZ insists that seemingly fixed systems, forest ecologies, nationalist histories, electronic beats are susceptible to collapse beneath the weight of entropy. The violence of “white lines” (borders, soldiers in columns) inevitably dissolve into an ambivalent stillness.
By sourcing sound from caves—spaces where stalactites “record” millennia in mineral drips—HYENAZ literalizes their critique of historiography. Here, the organic percussion becomes a counter-archive, its rhythms rejecting the fallacy of linear progress. The violence of “white lines” (borders, concertina wire, colonial maps) dissolves into what the poem terms stillness: not peace, but the cosmic indifference awaiting all human ordering projects.
Credits
Music & Concept
HYENAZ
Saxophone & Cave Recordings
Bartłomiej Kuźniak
Visual Art & Processing
Xenia Østergård Ramm, Old Erik (Hackstage Collective)
Eight young female bodies are lying in a tent, breathing in unison and protecting the rifles under their mattresses, waiting for the next mission. Their nightmares during the night and the daydreams of army’s everyday life are experienced together. Again and again the soldiers circle the multiple possibility of their own death. What dies in a person when they operate the trigger of a loaded gun? When does the dispossession of your own body begin? In the fourth part of her tetralogy, Let The Blood Come Out To Show Them, writer Sivan Ben Yishai holds a ceremony of memory. Which visible and invisible traces does serving the so-called fatherland leave in a person?
Selected for Radikal Jung – Festival für junge Regie 2020.
Credits
Written by
Sivan Ben Yishai
Directed by
Sasha Marianna Salzmann
Sound Design
HYENAZ
Stage & Costumes
Cleo Niemeyer
Dramaturgy
Rebecca Ajnwojner
Dramaturgic Advisor
Anna Heesen
Lighting Design
Fritz Stötzner
Sound Engineer
Miloš Janjić
Translation
Maren Kames
Cast
Kenda Hmeidan, Abak Safaei-Rad, Elena Schmidt, Catherine Stoyan
The CLUTERFUCK ensemble was born when PEACHES asked HYENAZ to choreograph a group of contemporary dancers for the Deutsche Oper Aus Dem Hinterhalt performance of Don Quichotte. In 2019. The group returned in PEACHES epic stage revue “There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle” with performances at Kampnagel, Hamburg, Royal Festival Hall, London, Musikhuset Aarhus and Volksbühne, Berlin. In 2021 Clusterfuck returned in a new PEACHES show called Cranky Pants, where they confronted and negotiated the ego that is generated between performers on the stage. Cranky Pants premiered at Theater Formen, Hannover, with additional performances at the KW Gallery 30-Year Anniversary Festival and Transart in Bozen.
Credits
Concept
PEACHES, HYENAZ
Choreography
HYENAZ, with ensemble
Ensemble Members
Adrienne Teicher, Mad Kate, Federica Dauri, Jao Moon, TRAUKO, Ginger Synne, Lori Baldwin, Bishop Black, Martini Cherry Furter
Porn Film Festival Berlin (honorable mention in the Porn Short Competition)
Instinct is a queer metaphysical love story that weaves itself through real and imagined sexual encounters across darkrooms, forest cruising zones, and highway shoulders. Immersive and deeply layered, the film presents fantastical playgrounds where bodies imagine themselves in a multiplicity of forms and long for encounters without preconceived notions of what other bodies desire, what they will need, or how they should be touched. Instead, Instinct asks: what does it mean to actively (un)learn what we might assume about another body’s sex, gender, and desire?
Ester Martin Bergsmark, Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Marit Östberg
Starring
Adrienne Teicher, Buffalo Grove, Christopher, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Finn, Jared Gradinger, Liz Rosenfeld, Mad Kate, Mere, MYSTI, Nika, Ocsaj, Paulita Pappel, River Rose, Sadie Lune, Tom Ass, Walter Crasshole
Rafael Medina, JorgeTheObscene, Sultan of Filth, Schoko Channel, Tristan Rehbold, Medad Rangay, Jo Pollux, Kate Hole, Candy Flip, Mad Kate, Nicky Miller, Gio Black Peter
Five queer Berliners of different generations and backgrounds take the audience on a performative journey through Berlin’s queer history between Pankow and Schöneberg, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, Mahlsdorf and Charlottenburg.
In search for the intersections of queer identities in a collective consciousness, they liquefy time, space, body and gender and connect with ancestors and future generations. The performers have been living in Berlin for generations or have recently moved here. They will channel their icons, ex-lovers and former selves to draw a political-personal portrait of queer Berlin between East and West.
Credits
Text and Direction
Yony Leyser
With
HYENAZ, Adrian Marie Blount, Jair Luna, Zazie de Paris
What happens when the community you need is not the community you have? Tell yourself it exists over and over, make fan zines that fabricate hordes of queer punk revolutionaries, create subversive movies, and distribute those movies widely—and slowly, the community you’ve fabricated might become a real and radical heartbeat that spreads internationally. This is the story that Queercore tells, from the start of a pseudo-movement in the mid-1980s, intended to punk the punk scene, to the widespread rise of artists who used radical queer identity to push back equally against gay assimilation and homophobic punk culture.
Interviewees discuss homophobia, gender, feminism, AIDS, assimilation, sex, and, of course, art. The extensive participant list includes Bruce LaBruce, G.B. Jones, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, John Waters, Justin Vivian Bond, Lynn Breedlove, Silas Howard, Pansy Division, Penny Arcade, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Deke Elash, Tom Jennings, Team Dresch, and many more.
Underscoring the interviews are clips from movies, zines, concerts, and actions iconic to the movement. As steeped in the radical queer, anti-capitalist, DIY, and give-no-fucks approach as queercore itself, the movie reveals the perspectives and experiences of bands, moviemakers, writers, and other outsiders, taking audiences inside the creation of the community—and art—so desperately needed by the same queers it encompassed.
HYENAZ’s sonic architecture for the film is a love letter to the physical labor of zine-making. Xerox photocopiers grind and whir like industrial choirs, their rhythmic churning transformed into percussive beats. Scissors slice through tape and paper in crisp, ASMR-like bursts, while the rustle of collaged pages becomes a textured whisper of rebellion. By amplifying the mundane tools of zine culture into a visceral soundscape, HYENAZ resurrects the movement’s tactile grit, turning the act of cutting, copying, and stapling into an anthem for marginalized world-building.
Winner “Most Bizaare”, Berlin Music Video Awards 2016
In Binaries, HYENAZ transmutes breath—the primal dyad of in/out—into a hyperventilating ritual for queer worldmaking. What begins as a rhythmic pulse escalates into a chaos magic crescendo: bodies and cameras spiral through absurdist pantomimes of “sacred/profane,” “curved/straight,” “hand/eye,” each binary fractured into flickering particles. The tension builds, breath by breath, until the breaking point—a gnostic rupture where intention blooms and viewers can send their desires for personal and political change into the universe.
Scenes of ritualized absurdity performed by two sea-monster like creatures: frying an egg, drinking milk, pissing in a tub are diced into microscopic shards using the Jawa technique, a glitch alchemy HYENAZ learned from Tasman Richardson. These fragments syncopate with sound and pixel, stitching together a hallucinatory tapestry where meaning slips its seams. Stylist Yeorg Kronnagel drapes the performers in textures that blur grotesque and divine, while cinematographer Rilk Mob lenses the chaos through a prism of queered light, bending shadows into collaborators.
This is critical magic as praxis: a refusal of fixed forms, a love letter to disintegration. Binaries invites you to breathe with its arrhythmia, to let your gaze stutter across its glitch-smeared syntax. There is no resolution here—only the fertile void where binaries combust, and from their ashes, something wilder stirs.
Binaries is part of HYENAZ’s Critical Magic project, where performative rituals become sites of radical re-enchantment.
Critical Magic 비평 적 마술 is a mixed-reality immersive performance by HYENAZ that fractures physical and mental isolation through somatic labor, sound, and contact. Between June 2016 and July 2018, the work’s full score unfolded 28 times—mirroring lunar phases—as part of their Probability Praxis Series. Each iteration relied on spontaneous interlocutors (volunteer performers) who bridged HYENAZ with site-specific communities, from Seoul to online spaces during the pandemic’s 2020 isolation peak.
The project dismantles the performer-audience binary, reimagining bodies as co-creators of transient utopias. Locations were conceptually mapped with the interlocutors beforehand, then post-processed through communal writing and feedback.
In each performance, HYENAZ invited audiences to join them in the performance of a ritualistic score. Each performacne revealed the challenges and joys of being together in a room, reading consent from strangers and near strangers, collectively building up our energies to reach the “height of gnosis” where a portal to personal and political change opens . As a marvellous and messy organizing of bodies, positionalities and perspectives, it was always a new performance. This praxis transformed each iteration into what HYENAZ term “a marvellous and messy organizing of bodies, positionalities and perspectives“.
Eva Donckers – Strangelove Festival Antwerp – 2017
Critical Magic 비평 적 마술 emerged from a site specific performance called “Spectral Rite” (2014) commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul with HYENAZ working under the direction of Korean artist Sylbee Kim. In this performance HYENAZ led a procession through the gallery environment, traversing its exhibits, and engaging its public. HYENAZ invoked a ritual to mourn a industrial accident during the construction of the gallery that had been suppressed in public memory and which had left many workers dead and injured.
From this initial performance Critical Magic 비평 적 마술 has evolved into a uniquely interactive performance that integrates electronic music, chaos magic, performance art, digital media, and interactive play; a moment outside of the everyday where HYENAZ blur distinctions between audience/performer and concert/interactive ritual. Critical Magic 비평 적 마술 walks the fine line between theatrical performance piece and sonic concert, critical theory and pop sensibility, bringing its audience into a liminal space of discovery.
Evolving into a hybrid of chaos magic, performance art, and electronic rave, Critical Magic 비평 적 마술 came to occupy a liminal zone between concert and interactive ritual. Styling by Yeorg Kronnagel (makeup/accessories) and Juan Chamié of EXIT (House of EXIT costumes), its aesthetic merged the celestial with pop spectacle. The music was mixed by HYENAZ and Bartłomiej Kuźniak, with high definition mastering by Bartłomiej Kuźniak at studio333.
Over two years of Probability Praxis workshops, HYENAZ refined the piece through public blogging and commentary, ensuring no two performances repeated.
“We want to thank each and every one of our interlocutors who have danced live and on screen with us throughout this series. They created worlds and pictures the likes of which we have never seen before or since. Our Interlocutors throughout this series have been:
Federica Dauri, ReveRso, Valentin Tszin, Nuit Nile, Donato, Savage Slit, David Wampach, Nathalie Mondot, Hana Frisonsova, Tereza Silon, Non la Décadence, Lu, Bishop Black, Olave Nduwanje, Pascal Mourits, Sanne van Driel, Yareth Habermehl, Dennis Snorremans, Lizzie Masterton, Mil Vukovic-Smart, ROC, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Danilo Andres, Yozhi Yazooma, Mojmir Mechura, Ambra Stucchi, Charlotte Busch, Isabel Jagoda, Joschi Rotheneder and Anonymous“
Photo: Claudia Brijbag Urban Spree Berlin 2016
Presentations
1. RTS-ZI RITOPEK, SERBIA PROBABILITY PRAXIS 1 of 28 – NEW MOON 8 JUNE 2016 (Special Thanks to our host Dragan Ilic)
2. Red Gate Arts Society, Vancouver, BC Canada PROBABILITY PRAXIS 2 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 2 July 2016
3. Masseria Jesse, near Alta Mura Italy PROBABILITY PRAXIS 3 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 12 July 2016 (Special Thanks to our host Donato)
4. Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany PROBABILITY PRAXIS 4 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 21 October 2016 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Federica Dauri, ReveRso, Valentin Tszin)
5. Cassera, Bologna, Italy PROBABILITY PRAXIS 5 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 28 October 2016
6. Clandestino, Faenza, Italy PROBABILITY PRAXIS 6 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 30 October 2016
7. ARGEKultur, Salzburg, Austria at Open Mind Festival PROBABILITY PRAXIS 7 of 28 – WAXING CRESCENT 19 November 2016
8. Humain trop Humain, Montpellier, France at Festival EXPLICIT PROBABILITY PRAXIS 8 of 28 – FIRST QUARTER 26 November 2016 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Savage Slit and David Wampach)
9. La Colonie, Paris, France at MN³ w/ Polychrome – Society of Silence PROBABILITY PRAXIS 9 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 17 December 2016 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Nathalie Mondot and Anonymous)
10. Underdogs Ballroom, Prague, Czech, with MENU and Hana Frisonsova PROBABILITY PRAXIS 10 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 20 May 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Hana Frisonsova and Tereza Silon and Thanks to our host Zdeněk Konečný)
11. Het-Bos, Antwerp, Belgium, STRANGELOVE Festival PROBABILITY PRAXIS 11 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 2 June 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Non la Décadence and Lu)
12. Hedonist International Congress, Rechlin–Lärz Airfield, Lärz, Deutschland, PROBABILITY PRAXIS 12 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 10 June 2017
13. Commune, Yerevan, Armenia PROBABILITY PRAXIS 13 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 8 July 2017
14. Ponderosa Movement and Discovery, Stolzenhagen, Germany PROBABILITY PRAXIS 14 of 28 – WAXING GIBBOUS 22 July 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutor: Tereza Silon)
15. Chateau Perche Festival, France PROBABILITY PRAXIS 15 of 28 – FULL MOON 5 August 2017
16. Garbicz Festival, Poland PROBABILITY PRAXIS 16 of 28 – WANING GIBBOUS 5 August 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Tereza Silon and Bishop Black)
17. Loppen. Christiania Denmark PROBABILITY PRAXIS 17 of 28 – WANING GIBBOUS 13 August 2017
18. AMS St. Georgen im Schwarzwald PROBABILITY PRAXIS 18 of 28 – WANING GIBBOUS 1 September 2017
19. WORM, Rotterdam, Netherlands PROBABILITY PRAXIS 19 of 28 – WANING GIBBOUS 2 September 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Olave Nduwanje, Manon la Decadance, Pascal Mourits, Lu, Sanne van Driel, Yareth Habermehl, Dennis Snorremans)
20. Winchester, England. Probability Praxis 20 of 28 15 September 2017 WANING GIBBOUS
21. COVEN – Underdog Gallery, London, England. Probability praxis 21 of 28 WANING GIBBOUS 16 September 2017 (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Lizzie Masterton, Mil Vukovic-Smart)
22. Zürich. Les Belles des Nuit PROBABILITY PRAXIS 22 of 28 27 October 2017 THIRD QUARTER
23. Queercore how to punk a revolution UT Connewitz, Leipzig, Germany. PROBABILITY PRAXIS 23 of 28 11 November 2018 WANING CRESCENT
23A. Urban Spree 17 February 2018 <<48 MINUTE SET >> (Thanks to our Interlocutors: ROC, Bishop Black, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Danilo Andres)
23B Köpi, Berlin, DE 30 April 2018 <<48 Minute Set>> (Thanks to our Interlocutors: Tereza Silon, ROC, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau , Federica Dauri)
24. S L Y // H Y E N A Z // PUNCTUM, Prague, CZ. PROBABILITY PRAXIS 24 of 28 20 May 2018 WANING CRESCENT (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Tereza Silon, Hana Frisonsova, Yozhi Yazooma, Mojmir Mechura)
25. Queer Culture, Thiembuktu, Magdeburg, DE PROBABILITY PRAXIS 23 of 28 26 May 2018 WANING CRESCENT
26. Torstrassen Festival, Berlin, Germany. 09 June 2018 WANING CRESCENT Berlin (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Ambra Stucchi, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau)
27. Les Beau est Toujour Bizarre, Parterre Am Ry, Basel, CH 16 June 2018 WANING CRESCENT
28. Kultur Fabrik, Hildesheim, DE 05 July 2018 WANING CRESCENT (Special Thanks to our Interlocutors: Charlotte Busch, Isabel Jagoda, Joschi Rotheneder)
The HYENAZ edit of Paula Temple’s techno classic “Gegen” was been featured in the Electronic Beats “Right to Assemble!” playlist, which explores music as an agent of change. Read more: https://www.electronicbeats.net/right-to-assemble-sounds/
So many assumptions are made about why people choose to move, who has the right to move, and who does not, who can simply travel on a whim and who must risk everything to leave their lands for others. Our sense of time and space is increasingly unbounded, as access to knowledge, art and the public sphere shared through electronically mediated communication. Yet so many still have to risk death or internment to cross national borders physically, with access to migration arbitrarily determined by pieces of paper distributed along class and racial lines.
HYENAZ were inspired by Paula’s powerful track Gegen, whose title refers to the German word for “against” and already expresses the dichotomous terms in which media and political discourses discuss migration: Are you for or against migration? How do “we” oppose the “others” who are against “our” way of life. The urgency of its siren-like lead synth speaks to the militarised policing of national borders and the desperation that pushes people to risk everything in order to exercise the human right to move freely.
Paula Temple released her track ‘Gegen’ via her imprint Noise Manifesto in 2014, at a time the German term was being widely used by protesters during an upheaval of asylum seekers in Germany.
“As refugees are fleeing for their lives, it is shocking we are creating similar conditions and hateful rhetoric as what happened in 1930s pre-WWII for political gain,” explained Temple in an official statement. “My personal hope is in our efforts to diminish the climate of hate with an overwhelming climate of empathy.”
A collaboration between HYENAZ, Sylbee Kim & Nico Pelzer
Dates
27-31 August 2014
MULTI-ARTS PROJECT II Annyeong! Hello! National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
Through the aural and visual act of the procession, Spectral Rite explores the architectural condition and the institutional environment of MMCA Seoul. Berlin-based performance duo HYENAZ incarnate as androgynous celestial beings, beautiful monsters, hybrid street peddlers and warriors for justice. Their presence evokes remote yet acquainted spaces, archaic and future tenses, as they appear within the MMCA as familiar strangers.
The procession is guided by an analytic approach to the architecture of MMCA Seoul, and implies contemplations around the destiny of a space which could rupture into another field of parallel time that is both history and future.
HYENAZ presented four musical compositions with lyrics in Korean exclusively composed for Spectral Rite. Each station in the procession is connected by movement transitions and atmospherically sung language. Reacting to the condition of mobility during the procession, the geometry of each costume is embedded with a variety of inventive solutions for acoustic and digital sound experimentation. The pseudo-instruments recall shamanistic tools, weapons of war, futuristic media machines and recognizably mimic existing instruments.
In Spectral Rite, the voice suggests a pre-linguistic phase of sound, and attempts to overcome language-centered systems as well as the impossibility of translation. The movement visualizes a yearning for a unified hybrid of gender, histories and spaces. Spectral Rite is a wedding of physical bodies and the architecture of the museum. As warriors, HYENAZ intend to prevail over apathy and daily complacency of consumerist and institutionalized city life.
Credits
Direction
Sylbee Kim
Performed by
HYENAZ
Music
HYENAZ with Nicolas Pelzer, Sylbee Kim
Lyrics
Sylbee Kim, HYENAZ, Nicolas Pelzer
Costumes
Juan Chamié (for EXIT)
Styling, Objects and Instruments
Yeorg Kronnagel with Rilk Mob
Projection
Sylbee Kim
Coordinator
Taejun Kim
Documentation
Sylbee Kim, Seung-Bum Hong, Nico Pelzer
Supported by
Korean Cultural Center, Berlin; Mi-Hyun Park (Gayageum)
In Cypher, HYENAZ uphold the hyena—a creature maligned as grotesque—as a totem of queer survival. The work unravels a love story spun through the animal’s mythos: its androgynous physiology, its scavenging, its supposed ugliness as a testament to thriving at the margins.
Graysister (Dušan Pejčić)’s video distills this ethos into a flesh-and-pixel psalm. The artists’ faces and bodies fuse into a luminous, three-breasted hybrid—part human, part apparition. Limbs and bones blur, and genders dissolve into a radiant monstrosity that defies categorization.
Through distortion and desire, Cypher weaponizes the hyena’s vilified traits—scavenging becomes resourcefulness, androgyny becomes multiplicity, ugliness becomes a radical self-acceptance. Here, love is not pristine communion but a feral pact.
In Sister, HYENAZ conjures a visceral dialogue between fusion and fracture. Filmed at Ngannelong (also known as Hanging Rock) the work captures artist Adrienne Teicher in a raw, psychedelic performance that mirrors the destabilizing thrall of longing. The work’s title invokes the eternally deferred ideal of sisterhood: a bond that promises wholeness but may never offer full or lasting consumation. HYENAZ’s soundscape oscillates between ethereal vocal symbiosis and electronic rupture, embodying the ecstatic terror of being both consumed by and estranged from a beloved other.
While the work does not explicitly address the history of Ngannelong, it is critical to remember that this is a site of profound significance to the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung, and Taungurung peoples, who were violently displaced during the genocidal campaigns of Australia’s frontier wars.
In their 2014 self titled debut, also known as “Scavenge”, HYENAZ imagined themselves as transgender hyena-humanoids, scavenging on the edges of apocalypse, building bodies and identities from civilization’s detritus.
HYENAZ are one, defiled and immaculate, their androgynous flesh quivering on the thin edge between the digital and the divine. They believe that all beings and matter are intrinsically connected, that we can choose utopia over dystopia, that time is an illusion. The album is written as an infinite circle. An electro-symphony, it is composed not track by track, but as a whole, adapting sounds and samples from around the world and influences from across time.
