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Tag: power

  • Eaten by the Waves: Taking Sound in an Age of Extraction

    Eaten by the Waves: Taking Sound in an Age of Extraction

    9 May 2025Placek Festival, Brno, Czechia

    Sound is never neutral—it is woven into fabrics of space, power, consent, and history. In this immersive six-hour workshop, artists HYENAZ guide participants through deep listening, field recording, and sound mapping as radical practices of attunement. Through hands-on exercises, discussion, and sonic experimentation, we explore how sound shapes our perception of place, storytelling, and agency in an era of extraction.

    Participants engage in:

    • Embodied Deep Listening — Attuning to the politics of frequency and vibration
    • Ethical Field Recording Tactics — Capturing soundscapes as acts of custodianship, not conquest
    • Alchemical Sound Design — Morphing found audio into musique concrète and speculative atmospheres using open source software
    • Sonic Storytelling — Weaving raw recordings into narratives of place and displacement

    Credits

    Workshop Concept, Design and ExecutionHYENAZ

  • 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
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    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.

    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
  • Art and Extractivism Reading Group

    Art and Extractivism Reading Group

    Dates

    23 & 30 May, 6 & 13 June, 2023Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin)
    27 June 2022Kampnagel (Hamburg)
    25 September 2022Casa Tranzit (Cluj)
    23 September 2022Atelierele Malmaison (Bucharest)
    14 September 2021Synth Library (Prague)
    14 August 2021Kombinatas Left Festival (Lithuania)

    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.

  • 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)
  • 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
  • Foreign Bodies

    Foreign Bodies

    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 synchronicity; bodies in resistance to management and control. In 2025, we began staging Foreign Bodies as a series called, “Animacies,” which has synthesised this ten year long work into live interactive performance presentations, each one slightly different from the other depending on the context.

    The project 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

  • Paula Temple – Gegen (I Want to Move HYENAZ Edit)

    Paula Temple – Gegen (I Want to Move HYENAZ Edit)

    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.

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    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.”

    Credits

    Original TrackPaula Temple
    TextMad Kate
    Vocal EditingAdrienne Teicher
    Vocals Recording & MasteringBartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)