Category: HYENAZ News

On the 6th August at 7pm, we’re taking over Refuge Radio to present works from and reflect on Foreign Bodies​, our decade-long sonic and movement research project.

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.

HYENAZ return to Munich’s University of Film and Television to teach a new workshop collaboration Pre-Production As Discovery, along with the artist and researcher Marlo Duchêne and hosted by Professor Beatrice Babin. The workshop is part of the University’s Summer School, and takes place from the 14th to the 18th of September.

This workshop offers filmmakers the chance to explore an emerging project and develop a proof of concept using generative AI, sound design, somatic practices, and creative exercises—not as finishing touches but as starting points. In most productions, sound and image-building tools arrive late or never. We reverse that sequence. You arrive with a raw concept—a mood, a texture, a fragment—and we begin generating audiovisual material immediately, before a screenplay exists.

Over five days on HFF’s LED virtual production stage, you’ll work collaboratively to build immersive sketches that become a film’s sensory language. Through hands-on experimentation with sound, movement, live AI visuals, and generative exercises rooted in human imagination rather than datasets, you’ll treat the sketch as a site of inquiry. These sketches evolve into a tangible, pulsing proof of concept—a sensory compass that guides what your project wants to become.

Along the way, we critically examine what these tools cost—practically, conceptually, ethically—and explore what it means to create with and beyond them. You’ll leave not with a treatment or a script, but with a vivid, working sense of your film’s sonic and visual world, ready to carry forward.

To bring HYENAZ to your community, space or institution, please contact us.

HYENAZ will perform an iteration of Animacies for Máquinas Deseantes a La Terminal on Saturday 15th August, alongside Cazzida dot, Dj ishak, Medusa, Hagamos ruido & Niza.

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.

HYENAZ were in Munich to teach a version of their workshop Techniques for Auditory Resistance for students at Munich’s University of Film and Television. The workshop ran from the 6th until the 17th of July.

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 sonic art shaped by the life-worlds of those who gather. Learn more here.

To bring HYENAZ to your community, space or institution, please contact us.

The HYENAZ film Instinct with Marit Ostberg and Ester Martin Bergsmark will screen at Post Porn Lab in Warsaw on the 27th June, 2026.

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?

The Post Porn Lab program focuses on images and narratives that operate outside the mainstream of visibility – on the peripheries of norm, aesthetics, and power. The featured films explore corporeality as a field of conflict, negotiation, and emancipation, challenging dominant regimes of representing sexuality, gender, desire, and intimacy.

Peripheries of visibility are a space for bodies, practices, and experiences that are repressed, stigmatized, or exoticized: a space for decolonizing ideas and questioning mainstream narratives. It is also a realm of aesthetic experiments, hybrid forms, and narrative ruptures.

Territories of resistance outline artistic and political strategies that reclaim agency over image, language, and pleasure. Here, post-pornography is not a genre but a critical tool – a way of dismantling norms, destabilizing the visual order, and producing new imaginaries of corporeality and relationships.

Post Porn Lab treats film screening as a space of communal experience, a laboratory for thinking, and a platform for dialogue. Each meeting builds a temporary community of audiences and creators, where cinema becomes a field for renegotiating the politics of looking, the ethics of representation, and the possibilities of emancipatory visual practices.

Curators: Aga Szreder and Rafał Żwirek

Our film INSTINCT which we created Ester Martin Bergsmark and Marit Ostberg will screen in Berlin at Kino Loop on the 9th of June. This film is dear to our hearts and captures scenes with many of our dear ones, filmed in Fxkn3000, an old queer Wagenplatz and in the tall cruising grasses of tempelhoferfeld. It was the summer before children, diagnosis, before many things. It felt new at the time for me/us in my/our queer story and like many of what drives queer projects we were hoping to show something new on screen too. And these moments are ephemera….

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.

Foreign Bodies RELEASE CELEBRATION
SPRING PICNIC to celebrate the release of Foreign Bodies
17 May 2026 / 2PM-5PM Tempelhofer Feld

We asked what would feel best for us to celebrate this long journey to create FOREIGN BODIES and we realized that what we most wanted was to sit in the park with all the friends and loved ones who are woven into this long process. We will bring a speaker to share the music, but mostly we hope to hug and laugh and eat together.

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: HYENAZ (Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher)
Mixing & Mastering: Steve Voidloss at Black Monolith Studios
Featured Musicians: Yusuph Suso (Gambian griot), Bartłomiej Kuźniak (saxophonist), Uday (guitarist from BgB field recording

FEATURED SPEAKERS

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)
Ambra Stucchi (bodyworker, dancer, healer)
Danilo Andres (choreographer, dancer)
Vito Maiulari (artist, sculptor, sound researcher)
Donato Laborante (poet, storyteller, performer)
Lorca Miziolek (contributor)
activists and choir members at anarcho-feminist & anti-military conference

TRANSLATORS:

Eleanora Moramarco
Federica Dauri
Mariatereza Natuzzi

Chronoshift is out with an explicit trans-tectonic music video premiering at 23:59 on New Years Eve (Berlin time).

Chronoshift is about the relationship between the frenetic now and the long durations upon which our bodies stand: AS STONE MOVES WE MOVE.

More here:

Are you a musician who wants to deepen their somatic practices? 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.

Workshop Information:
Dates: Mon 19 January, Wed 21 January, Wed 28 January, Wed 4th February
Time: 18:00-21:00
Location: Orchestral Tools, Pfuelstraße 5, 10997, Berlin

More Details:
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.

Across four weeks 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.

By the end of this workshop series, those who take part will be equipped with the tools and knowledge to create unique and powerful sound-based performances.

We will perform an iteration of Animacies at the legendary Transforma Festival in Tabor, Czechia on the 4th July.

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.This Friday (04/07) at @transforma_tabor HYENAZ perform a ritual of bodies in motion and bodies in resistance, presenting texts, sounds and collaborative choreographies from their FOREIGN BODIES project.

We will undertake a one-week residency at Placek Festival in Brno, Czechia culminating in a performance that incorporates sounds, texts, and scores developed from our Foreign Bodies research project. The workshop will engage with deep listening, contextual mapping, and sonic manipulations, as we discuss animacy, consent, and the politics of sound.

April 22, 7pm
As part of Activist Choreographies of Care at NGBK Berlin

Join us for a screening of EKU EKU EKU (a call to death), a musical and visual collaboration by HYENAZ and VaBene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinist artist). Filmed by Sally Dige and Onsoh Studio at silent green in 2021, the work emerged from a virtual partnership residency supported by the Goethe-Institut. While physically apart, the artists embarked on a shared deep listening journey around death—VaBene in a cemetery in Kumasi, HYENAZ in a former crematorium in Berlin—conjuring a space for ritual, resonance, and transformation.

Free entry.

Our a/v work Signals screens in Athens, accompanied by a live performance by Mad Kate on Saturday 12 April.

Created for Washington DC’s Sound Scene Festival 2021 and its theme EMERGE​, Signals was supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, and the Goethe-Institut.

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?

ACT is a project initiated by 10 cultural operators from 10 European countries, working in the field of performing and visual arts. ACT is a project with the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

In 2023 a group of artists and performers gathered in Skopje, North Macedonia for a program organised by the NGO Lokomotiva. HYENAZ represented the Kampnagel theatre in Hamburg.