Adrienne Teicher

Category: HYENAZ Works: Foreign Bodies

  • Inbetweens

    why inbetween

    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.

  • Audibility

    Audibility

    Featuring Donato Laborante

    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.

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    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.

    Credits

    Text, Vocals, Music & VideoKathryn (Roi) Fischer & Adrienne Teicher
    PoemDonato Laborante
  • Perimeter

    Perimeter

    Dates

    June 3 – July 31 2022Come Alive, Het Nieuwe Muntgebouw, Utrecht

    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.

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    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.

    Credits

    Music & ConceptHYENAZ
    PerformersMad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Martini Cherry Furter, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau
    Artistic DirectionYeorg Kronnagel
    CinematographyRobert Mleczko
    Video EditHYENAZ
    SaxophoneBartlomiej Kuzniak
    ClarinetAlex Spree
    RemixesIXA, Maya Postepski (Princess Century)

  • Proximity

    Proximity

    DATES

    08 & 10 June 2023Hamburg Short Film Festival (Screening)
    04 August 2018Garbicz Festival (Performance)
    25 July 2018Martin Gropius Bau (Research Intervention)

    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.

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    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.

    Credits

    Music, Concept, Design, Styling & EditingHYENAZ
    ChoreographyMad Kate
    CinematographyJo Pollux and Raja de Luna
    MoversDanilo Andrés, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Bishop Black, ROC, Adrienne Teicher
  • Ex Situ

    Ex Situ

    Dates

    August 18, 2023Mad Time Warp by party office
    Rehearsing Moves on Hazy Paths
    ZK/U
    July 22, 2023Mad Time Warp by party office
    Nida Art Colony
    June 18 – September 25 2022Mad Time Warp by party office
    documenta fifteen
    1-11 September 2022Sculpture Exhibit at Queer Week
    Maxim Gorki Theater

    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.

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    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 & VocalsYusuph Suso
    Music and ConceptHyenaz
    Sculpture DesignLau Bau
    VideographyYusuph Suso
    Video EditHyenaz
    Creative CodeRodrigo Frenk
    RemixSky Deep
    Supported byMusikfonds, Neustart Kultur, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
  • Signals

    Signals

    Dates

    11-13 April 202512th International Video POETRY FESTIVAL ATHENS
    15-17 June 2023membra(I)nes: 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association
    Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
    20 May 2023Sivan Ben Yishai: Wit(h)nessing
    Haus der Berliner Festspiele
    6 June 2021Washington DC’s Sound Scene Festival “EMERGE”

    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.

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    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.

    Credits

    Text, Vocals, Music & VideoKathryn (Roi) Fischer & Adrienne Teicher
  • Columns

    Columns

    Dates

    November 4 2023Kino Club
    Lapinlahden Lähde, Helsinki
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    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 & ConceptHYENAZ
    Saxophone & Cave RecordingsBartłomiej Kuźniak
    Visual Art & ProcessingXenia Østergård Ramm, Old Erik (Hackstage Collective)
    Source Footage and Video EditHYENAZ
    RemixesLady Maru, Bad Conscience, Consumer Refund, NVRS