With Animacies, HYENAZ stage their 10 years of Foreign Bodies research and musical compositions, giving them form in large part through interactive performance scores developed during their 2023 residency at Hamburg’s Kampnagel theatre. These scores operate as live co-creations: through which those gathered are challenged 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.
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.
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.
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)
