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Tag: body politics

  • Automine

    Automine

    Dates

    18 May 2024Performatorio, Bergamo, Italy
    12 May 2024Festa Delle Transumanze, Masseria Jesce, Altamura, Italy
    22 September 2023CW / Hive Film Festival
    Flutgraben Berlin
    16 September 2023Bygdapride
    Øystese, Norway
    25-26 May 2022Performing Arts Festival Berlin
    ACUD Theatre Berlin
    18 April 2022Y: N𝙤rmal B𝙤dies
    Divadlo X10
    Prague
    9-10 December 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    ACUD Theatre
    Berlin
    26 September 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    Casa Tranzit, Cluj
    23 September 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    Atelierele Malmaison
    Bucharest, Romania
    16 September 2021
    15 September 2021    		Performance: Cross Attic, Prague
    Artist talk: Synth Library, Prague

    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.

    Credits

    TextHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ
    Video DesignHYENAZ
    Set DesignMad Kate
    StylingYeorg Kronnagel, Mad Kate
    Costume DesignJuan Chamié (House of EXIT)
  • Knowbody

    Knowbody

    Dates

    15 June 2019Maxim Gorki Studio Я, Pugs in Love Queer Week

    KNOWBODY confronts the contemporary paradox of bodily erasure in an age enthralled by automation, artificial intelligence, and the lure of digital transcendence. At a time when deepfakes simulate authenticity and biometric surveillance reduces flesh to data points, the work insists on the body as an irreducible site of knowledge. HYENAZ interrogates this tension through a dual lens: the performance of the body (its capacities, vulnerabilities, and rituals) and the body in performance (its role as medium and meaning-maker within communal spaces).

    The project posits live performance as a radical countermeasure to disembodiment. Unlike virtual interactions mediated by screens and algorithms, “a performance” demands corporeal presence: performers sweating under stage lights, audiences breathing in shared rhythm, interlocutors exchanging glances across a charged void. HYENAZ frames this gathering of bodies—whether in collision, collaboration, or quiet coexistence—as a political act. By assembling in physical proximity, participants rediscover what the artists term the immanent territory of the flesh: the body’s stubborn materiality, its capacity to archive lived trauma and joy, its resistance to full digitization.

    Premiering on 15 June 2019 at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Studio Я—a venue historically engaged with post-migrant narratives and embodied dissent—KNOWBODY weaponizes this rediscovery. The work’s structure mirrors its thesis: live vocals rupture pre-recorded tracks, improvisation undermines algorithmic predictability, and audience touch (consensual, charged, fleeting) becomes a compositional element. HYENAZ does not romanticize the body’s fragility; instead, they amplify its contradictions—how it can be both a site of oppression and liberation, a commodity and a conspirator.

    In resisting the abstraction of selves into profiles or neural networks, KNOWBODY asks: What truths persist when we stop performing for systems and start performing through our bodies? The answer, they suggest, is slime. Lots and lots of slime.

    Credits

    TextHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ
    Video DesignHYENAZ
    StylingYeorg Kronnagel, Mad Kate
    Costume DesignJuan Chamié (House of EXIT)