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Tag: queer

  • Animacies

    Dates

    8 May 2025Placek Festival, Brno, Czechia
    4 July 2025Transforma Festival, Tabor, Czechia
    Photo: Vojtěch Šoula

    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.

  • 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.

    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer

    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
  • Pain Can Be A Place

    Pain Can Be A Place

    with Aérea Negrot

    Dates

    2 June 2024IT’S LOVER, LOVE – Wake for Lost Ones, Xposed Film Festival, Aquarium, Berlin

    In 2022, director Yony Leyser asked HYENAZ to develop a sound design for his film The Fourth Generation, which starred and was loosely based/not based on the life-force that is Aérea Negrot—singer, producer, DJ, and performer. One morning, Aérea joined us in our studio to help create an auditory mood for the film’s peak, where the protagonist places a cartoonish ticking time-bomb at the feet of Germany’s newly elected dictator.

    Image by Xposed Queer Film Festival

    Aérea took to the microphone and, over twenty or thirty minutes, unleashed a torrent of sounds, tones, voices—an overflow, a rupture that was beautiful, stirring, and at times unsettling. We took only what served the film and parked the rest in our deep memories.

    In 2023, Aérea died.

    For the 2024 edition of the Xposed Film Festival, a memorial for Aérea was arranged by Shu Lea Chang, Jürgen Brüning, and Alex Demitriou, who worked with Aérea on a number of Shu Lea’s films. Seeing the call for contributions, we returned to the material from the film and presented it at the wake.

    Kate remembered that there was more, a great deal more, than what we had used in the film. We opened the project in our DAW and stretched out the audio track, discovering an extended crescendo in which the text “Pain can be a place of future transformation” emerged.

    At times, the words sound like a prayer, at others a demand.

    We arranged Aérea’s voice in layers interspersed with drones formed by stretching out her syllables. Finally, with gentle chords and a melody, Aérea asks the listener to chant the mantra with her into infinity.

  • Perimeter

    Perimeter

    Dates

    June 3 – July 31 2022Come Alive, Het Nieuwe Muntgebouw, Utrecht
    Buy:Bandcamp
    Stream:Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer · SoundCloud

    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)

  • Queering Audibility

    Queering Audibility

    A collaboration with Eyk Kauly and Antkek Engel

    Dates

    11 April 2024 / 20:00Lettrétage in der Veteranenstraße 21
    Deutsch / English / DGS (mit Dolmetschung)

    Queering Audibility is a collaboration between deaf performance artist Eyk Kauly and the hearing sound artists HYENAZ. Together they explore how artists can use the entirety of their physical and affective sensorium to create new works and to challenge the conditions through which audibility comes into being.

    In this open rehearsal, the audience is invited to engage with the following questions: How does embodied performance and sign language inspire the creation of soundscapes? How does sound translate – with the help of sign language interpreters – into bodily experiences? Can sounding performance and performing sound help (re)imagine the perceived binary of Deaf and hearing, or other binaries? How are those bound to hearing, being heard and what does queering mean in the context of this audibility?

    HYENAZ would like thank the Imaginando who donated VS (Visual Synthesizer) to the project. VS is an exciting tool that can create visuals from audio or midi signals. You can learn more about VS here: https://www.imaginando.pt/products/vs-visual-synthesizer

    Credits

    Concept & PerformanceHYENAZ / Eyk Kauly
    CurationAntkek Engel, iQt Berlin
    SupportFranziska Winkler, Handverlesen, Aktion Mensch, iQt, Imaginando
  • A Body Like Mine

    A Body Like Mine

    Premiere: DOC.BERLIN Film Festival 2023 / Winner: Best German Documentary
    International Premiere: 38th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival
    Broadcast/Streaming: 3SAT Germany 

    A BODY LIKE MINE is the poetic portrait of a young artist and activist named Puck (they/them). Puck is not their legal name, it is a character the artist has created and transforms into during their performances. As co-writer and protagonist of the film, the artist talks about how Puck’s existence helps them to feel more grounded in a world they experience as overwhelming. While Puck dares to do wild things, such as queer post porn and wrestling, Puck’s creator themself shares their vulnerability. In the film they contemplate the discrepancy between themself and their character: They talk about how they are often misunderstood, judged, and fetishized. How they are assigned gender stereotypes they don’t want to conform to. Puck’s activism consists of their visibility as a proud Black person and of staging themself as part of phantasies and images that bodies like theirs traditionally have been banished from.

    A BODY LIKE MINE is a fairy-tale like documentary. Conceived through the artistic collaboration between Puck and director Maja Classen, the film allows for an intimate and moving glimpse into Puck’s lifestyle, their inspirations, fears and experiences.-

    CREDITS

    DirectorMaja Classen
    WriterMaja Classen, Puck
    Director of PhotographyAlina Albrecht
    CastPuck, Bishop Black, Playgirls Mansion Collective, Manon Praline, Torri Lisek
    EditingThomas Krause and Maya Steinberg
    Original MusicVanessa Chartrand-Rodrigue
    Sound RecordistsAdrienne Teicher, Koenraad Ecker, Marina Funck
    Sounddesign & Final MixUwe Bossenz
    Production DesignerMiren Oller
    ProducerSaralisa Volm
    Production ManagerAnja Neuhaus
    In Co-produktion withZDF/3sat
    Production CompanyA POISON production
    DistributionDistributed by POISON
  • 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.

    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify

    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
  • Chokehole

    Chokehole

    One hot summer night in New Orleans a drag collective staged wrestling night. They dressed up as their vibrant alter-egos, and proceeded to beat the living daylights out each other while the audience collectively lost their shit. That night, Chokehole was born. This documentary follows Chokehole as they take the show to Germany, sharing the stories of cast members as they grapple with racism, gender conformism, queer identity and America’s suppression of the arts.

    The film depicts the artists both with and without drag, sharing their larger-than-life and theatrical alter egos while displaying the unique vulnerabilities that lie behind the character. This film explores their loud, vibrant personas alongside their heart-breaking personal stories, and the adversity they’ve had to overcome to be accepted in the US. As the documentary progresses, we learn how each character copes with love, sex, transitions, post-trauma, and socioeconomics while offering a glimpse into their fantastical, vivid world… which is as much an escape for the artists as it is for the audience.

    “Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers do Deutschland” is the story of how disenfranchised, queer performers defeated all the odds to make a compelling theatrical show.

    Chokehole screened at New Orleans Film Festival, Outfest and Chicago Underground Film Festival.

    Credits

    DirectorYony Leyser
    Music & Sound DesignHYENAZ
    Sound RecordistsAdrienne Teicher & Kathryn Fischer
    CinematographyShane Thomas McMillan
    EditorRuth Schönegge
    Sound Re-recording MixerCornelius Rapp
  • The Fourth Generation

    The Fourth Generation

    Premiere – Vienna Queer Shorts Festival

    The Fourth Generation, is a homage to Berlin’s vibrant underground and the communities that breathe life into the city. The film is set in a dystopian future, but the themes explored are very real. Queer identity, feminism, sexuality and the intersection of politics and art. In the near future Professional provocateur and artist Maven Shegula has returned to Berlin after a hiatus in Zürich. She’s back to celebrate her 50th birthday, and to appear on a popular German talk show.

    As she wanders the streets of Berlin with her girlfriend and friend, it becomes apparent that being an artist in this city is no longer acceptable. The humming nightlife has disappeared, and the vibrant creative community pushed to the margins of society. The film is alive with tension, both sexual and otherwise. As Maven’s story unfurls on live television, we learn about her son, her politics, her  heritage and her alter-ego Rosa who champions radical self-expression and  feminism. The interview is dispersed with beautiful and volcanic eruptions from Maven that act as both a denunciation of the city’s leadership and a love letter to Berlin.

    Packed full of vibrant fashion, queerness, dark humour and experimental visuals, The Fourth Generation depicts every artists worst nightmare – and the lengths one woman will go to stand by
    what she believes in. The film features a predominantly trans and non-binary cast.

    Credits

    Directed and Written byYony Leyser
    Sound DesignHyenaz (Kathryn Fischer & Adrienne Teicher)
    CastAerea Negrot, Gigi Spelsberg, Yvon Jansen, Daniel Zillmann, Mano Thiravong, Mathea Hoffmann, Chilly Gonzales
    CinematographyPaul Faltz
    EditingHamed Mohammadi
    Art DirectorDarko Petrovic
    Production DesignJeff Schaul, Victoria Shved
    Costume DesignAlexis Mersmann
  • The Circlusion of Fancy

    The Circlusion of Fancy

    The German version of this text on the italodisco artist Fancy was first published in Siegessäule for their regular column “Drehmoment”, in which musicians describe an album that is of key importance to them. Here is the text in English.

    The word “circlusion” is penetration’s other. It describes a sexual act in which one thing, normally an orifice, encloses another thing inside itself, for instance when an anus circludes a cock or a vagina circludes a dildo. Whereas this “being penetrated” is normally considered passive in heteronormative and even homonormative discourses, the circluding orifice can be both active and passive; even transcend this binary altogether.

    Popular music, for the most part, reproduces masculinist tropes of phallus-worship. Take a song like Closer by Nine Inch Nails. When Trent Reznor sings “I want to fuck you like an animal,” do you imagine that he is penetrating, or do you envision that Reznor is circluding you, with his anus, his mouth or his cunt? Our society valorises penetration and there is a direct line between the libidnal worship of frontmen on the one hand and fascist dictators on the other.

    Enter Munich-born italo-disco star Fancy, who I read as an out and proud circluder. Take the single Slice Me Nice. Atop Moroder-esque synths and drum machines, Fancy reveals to us that he is “like a cake that wants to be baked,” adding “It’s time for action baby, cut me in two”. Its a simple perhaps crude image, yet it makes the pleasure of making one’s body a host for another active.

    In L.A.D.Y. O, Fancy explicitly recasts the masochistic protagonist of the novel Story of O as a sadistic dominatrix. Whereas in the novel, the penetration of O’s orifices by members of a secret society is intrinsically linked to her submissiveness, in Fancy’s retelling, he becomes the submissive and begs her to “Tie me up, give me pain”. He goes on: “Chain me, I can’t stand no more” while assuring her that he is “gonna like it for sure.” O, in both the novel and in the song, could very well stand for orifice. But in Fancy’s hands O can no longer stand for object, for it is she who has the active role in his fantasy.

    This ingeniously closes the circle between active and passive, penetration and circlusion. Again and again, Fancy shows us that sex need not be a dyad, but a vast ocean of sensations, organs and ways of relating to one another.

  • 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.

    STREAMSpotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer
    BUYBandcamp

    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
  • Körper Figurationen Welten

    Körper Figurationen Welten

    Körper Figurationen Welten introduces queer studies as a transdisciplinary research field in an intersectional way. The interplay of power and desire causes physical, mental and emotional movements in space and time. According to queer theory, these can solidify into domination, sometimes even take on violent forms; but they can also cause attraction, unexpected connections and movements, forms of pleasurable encounters or intimacy. Queer theory is power analysis and criticism of domination, which faces the contradicting challenge of criticizing difference as social inequality, but promoting it as uniqueness and particularity. The videos test experimental formats and queer aesthetics. Because the question of what is presented is directly related to the question of how it is presented. As is shown, in turn refers to possibilities and limits that are open to the imagination and desire or are set.

    The videos are freely available as Open Educational Resources at the following link: e.feu.de/queer-theory-videos

    The work was featured on the radio program “Gerecht Sprechen – Über die Lust auf Gendersternchen, neue Pronomen und Co.” hosted by Sabine Rolf on BR2.

    Credits

    Concept & Academic DirectionAntkek Engel
    Film ProductionFilmfetch (Magda Wystub; Tali Tiller)
    Sound DesignHYENAZ
    Produced byFernUniversität Hagen
  • 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

  • Peaches x Clusterfuck

    Peaches x Clusterfuck

    Photo Aris Akritidis for INFRINGE

    DATES

    18 September 2021KW Berlin
    9 September 2021Transart, Bozen
    28 June 2021Theaterformen, Hannover
    28-31 December 2019Volksbühne, Berlin
    31 August 2019Musikhuset Aarhus
    29 August2019Royal Festival Hall, London
    15-17 August 2019Kampnagel, Hamburg
    28 June 2019Deutsche Oper

    The CLUTERFUCK ensemble was born when PEACHES asked HYENAZ to choreograph a group of contemporary dancers for the Deutsche Oper Aus Dem Hinterhalt performance of Don Quichotte. In 2019. The group returned in PEACHES epic stage revue “There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle” with performances at Kampnagel, Hamburg, Royal Festival Hall, London, Musikhuset Aarhus and Volksbühne, Berlin. In 2021 Clusterfuck returned in a new PEACHES show called Cranky Pants, where they confronted and negotiated the ego that is generated between performers on the stage. Cranky Pants premiered at Theater Formen, Hannover, with additional performances at the KW Gallery 30-Year Anniversary Festival and Transart in Bozen.

    Credits

    ConceptPEACHES, HYENAZ
    ChoreographyHYENAZ, with ensemble
    Ensemble MembersAdrienne Teicher, Mad Kate, Federica Dauri, Jao Moon, TRAUKO, Ginger Synne, Lori Baldwin, Bishop Black, Martini Cherry Furter

  • Instinct

    Instinct

    DATES

    1 June 2024Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival, Berghain Halle
    2 July 2021Pornceptual Cinema, Alte Münze, Berlin
    17 September 2021Sexclusivitäten, Berlin
    25 September 2021Queer Art Fest, Rågsveds Folkets hus, Stockholm
    29 September 2020Fusion Film Festival, Oslo
    29 November 2019Dirty Diaries 10 year Anniversary, Stockholm
    24-28 October 2019Porn Film Festival Berlin (honorable mention in the Porn Short Competition)

    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?

    StreamPink Label

    Credits

    DirectorsEster Martin Bergsmark, Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Marit Östberg
    StarringAdrienne Teicher, Buffalo Grove, Christopher, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Finn, Jared Gradinger, Liz Rosenfeld, Mad Kate, Mere, MYSTI, Nika, Ocsaj, Paulita Pappel, River Rose, Sadie Lune, Tom Ass, Walter Crasshole
    EditJasco Viefhues
    Line ProducerPaula Alamillo
  • The MultiVerse in a MouthFuck

    The MultiVerse in a MouthFuck

    Selected Dates

    June 7th–12th, 2022Post Porn Film Festival (Warsaw, Poland)
    October 6th–10th, 2021Porn Film Festival Vienna (Vienna, Austria) [BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM]
    September 10th–12th, 2021SECS FEST (online, USA) [BEST SEX-POSITIVE FILM]
    May 21st–30th, 2021Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival (Calgary, Canada)
    December 3rd, 2020CineKink NYC (online, US) [HONORABLE MENTION]
    November 20th–22nd, 2020Satyrs and Maenads: The Athens Porn Film Festival (Athens, Greece)
    September 28th, 2020Oslo/Fusion International Film Festival (Oslo, Norway)
    February 1st, 2020Excéntrico: Muestra Internacional de Pornografías Críticas (Santiago, Chile)
    October 2019Berlin PornFilmFestival (Berlin, Germany)

    A metaphysical trip of self discovery, from the seven principles of Hermetism to the seven keys to master our lives (Inspired by true fuckts)

    StreamPinkLabel

    Credits

    CastRafael Medina, JorgeTheObscene, Sultan of Filth, Schoko Channel, Tristan Rehbold, Medad Rangay, Jo Pollux, Kate Hole, Candy Flip, Mad Kate, Nicky Miller, Gio Black Peter
    Written, Directed, EditedJorgeTheObscene
    ProducerJorgeTheObscene
    Assistant DirectorDoxytocine
    Director of PhotographyTheo Meow, Jo Pollux
    CameraTheo Meow, Michal ANdrysiak
    Still PhotographyJo Pollux
    LightsMichal ANdrysiak
    Art/CostumesMad Kate, Michal ANdrysiak, EXIT
    Sound DesignHYENAZ
    Location Sound MixerHYENAZ
    Producer AssistantFelipe Carrasco
  • 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)

  • W(a)rmholes

    W(a)rmholes

    Dates

    12-15 June 2019Maxim Gorki Theatre, Studio Я
    Photo Esra Rotthoff

    Five queer Berliners of different generations and backgrounds take the audience on a performative journey through Berlin’s queer history between Pankow and Schöneberg, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, Mahlsdorf and Charlottenburg.

    In search for the intersections of queer identities in a collective consciousness, they liquefy time, space, body and gender and connect with ancestors and future generations. The performers have been living in Berlin for generations or have recently moved here. They will channel their icons, ex-lovers and former selves to draw a political-personal portrait of queer Berlin between East and West.

    Credits

    Text and DirectionYony Leyser
    WithHYENAZ, Adrian Marie Blount, Jair Luna, Zazie de Paris
    Sound DesignHYENAZ
    DramaturgyTobias Herzberg
    Stage Design & VideoShahrzad Rahmani, Camille Lacadee
    Costume DesignAnne Fidler
  • The Beauty of ReveRso

    The Beauty of ReveRso

    Credits

    StarringReveRso, Thea Adora Bauer, Chika Takahashi, Julietta la Doll, Yeorg Kronnagel, Sekou
    MusicHYENAZ
    Make-up ArtistYeorg Kronnagel
    Costume DesignReveRso, Yeorg Kronnagel
    Sound DesignJoscha Eickel
    Production AssistantLeo Carnein, Christoph Brunner
    Director of Photography, Editing, PostproductionLukas Kunzmann
    Written, Produced, Directed byBrent Adam
    Executive ProducerRainer Spix @ Who’s McQueen

    Selected Festivals

    • Hollywood International Independent Documentary Award 2018
    • Festival de Cannes Shortfilmcorner 2018
    • Redline International Filmfestival 2018 (4 nominations – winner “Best Documentary Short”)
    • Atlanta Docufest 2018 (winner: “Best Foreign Documentary Short”)
    • International Fashionfilm Festival Sarajevo 2018 (award winner “Best Story”)
  • Queercore

    Queercore

    DATES

    12 June 2017Sheffield Doc/Fest (Premiere)
    17 June 2017Frameline
    15 July 2017Outfest
    2018ARTE

    What happens when the community you need is not the community you have? Tell yourself it exists over and over, make fan zines that fabricate hordes of queer punk revolutionaries, create subversive movies, and distribute those movies widely—and slowly, the community you’ve fabricated might become a real and radical heartbeat that spreads internationally. This is the story that Queercore tells, from the start of a pseudo-movement in the mid-1980s, intended to punk the punk scene, to the widespread rise of artists who used radical queer identity to push back equally against gay assimilation and homophobic punk culture.

    Interviewees discuss homophobia, gender, feminism, AIDS, assimilation, sex, and, of course, art. The extensive participant list includes Bruce LaBruce, G.B. Jones, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, John Waters, Justin Vivian Bond, Lynn Breedlove, Silas Howard, Pansy Division, Penny Arcade, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Deke Elash, Tom Jennings, Team Dresch, and many more.

    Underscoring the interviews are clips from movies, zines, concerts, and actions iconic to the movement. As steeped in the radical queer, anti-capitalist, DIY, and give-no-fucks approach as queercore itself, the movie reveals the perspectives and experiences of bands, moviemakers, writers, and other outsiders, taking audiences inside the creation of the community—and art—so desperately needed by the same queers it encompassed.

    HYENAZ’s sonic architecture for the film is a love letter to the physical labor of zine-making. Xerox photocopiers grind and whir like industrial choirs, their rhythmic churning transformed into percussive beats. Scissors slice through tape and paper in crisp, ASMR-like bursts, while the rustle of collaged pages becomes a textured whisper of rebellion. By amplifying the mundane tools of zine culture into a visceral soundscape, HYENAZ resurrects the movement’s tactile grit, turning the act of cutting, copying, and stapling into an anthem for marginalized world-building.

    Credits

    Written and Directed byYony Leyser
    Produced byNina Berfelde
    StarringLynn Breedlove
    Kim Gordon
    Kathleen Hanna
    Silas Howard
    G.B. Jones
    Bruce LaBruce
    Genesis P-Orridge
    Peaches
    John Waters
    Music byHyenaz
  • Binaries

    Binaries

    Winner “Most Bizaare”, Berlin Music Video Awards 2016

    In Binaries, HYENAZ transmutes breath—the primal dyad of in/out—into a hyperventilating ritual for queer worldmaking. What begins as a rhythmic pulse escalates into a chaos magic crescendo: bodies and cameras spiral through absurdist pantomimes of “sacred/profane,” “curved/straight,” “hand/eye,” each binary fractured into flickering particles. The tension builds, breath by breath, until the breaking point—a gnostic rupture where intention blooms and viewers can send their desires for personal and political change into the universe.

    Scenes of ritualized absurdity performed by two sea-monster like creatures: frying an egg, drinking milk, pissing in a tub are diced into microscopic shards using the Jawa technique, a glitch alchemy HYENAZ learned from Tasman Richardson. These fragments syncopate with sound and pixel, stitching together a hallucinatory tapestry where meaning slips its seams. Stylist Yeorg Kronnagel drapes the performers in textures that blur grotesque and divine, while cinematographer Rilk Mob lenses the chaos through a prism of queered light, bending shadows into collaborators.

    This is critical magic as praxis: a refusal of fixed forms, a love letter to disintegration. Binaries invites you to breathe with its arrhythmia, to let your gaze stutter across its glitch-smeared syntax. There is no resolution here—only the fertile void where binaries combust, and from their ashes, something wilder stirs.

    Binaries is part of HYENAZ’s Critical Magic project, where performative rituals become sites of radical re-enchantment.

    CREDITS

    Lead ArtistHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ
    PerformersHYENAZ
    StylistYeorg Kronnagel
    CinematographerRilk Mob
    Video EditHYENAZ
  • Spectral Rite

    Spectral Rite

    A collaboration between HYENAZ, Sylbee Kim & Nico Pelzer

    Dates

    27-31 August 2014MULTI-ARTS PROJECT II Annyeong! Hello!
    National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

    Through the aural and visual act of the procession, Spectral Rite explores the architectural condition and the institutional environment of MMCA Seoul. Berlin-based performance duo HYENAZ incarnate as androgynous celestial beings, beautiful monsters, hybrid street peddlers and warriors for justice. Their presence evokes remote yet acquainted spaces, archaic and future tenses, as they appear within the MMCA as familiar strangers.

    The procession is guided by an analytic approach to the architecture of MMCA Seoul, and implies contemplations around the destiny of a space which could rupture into another field of parallel time that is both history and future.

    HYENAZ presented four musical compositions with lyrics in Korean exclusively composed for Spectral Rite. Each station in the procession is connected by movement transitions and atmospherically sung language. Reacting to the condition of mobility during the procession, the geometry of each costume is embedded with a variety of inventive solutions for acoustic and digital sound experimentation. The pseudo-instruments recall shamanistic tools, weapons of war, futuristic media machines and recognizably mimic existing instruments.

    In Spectral Rite, the voice suggests a pre-linguistic phase of sound, and attempts to overcome language-centered systems as well as the impossibility of translation. The movement visualizes a yearning for a unified hybrid of gender, histories and spaces. Spectral Rite is a wedding of physical bodies and the architecture of the museum. As warriors, HYENAZ intend to prevail over apathy and daily complacency of consumerist and institutionalized city life.

    Credits

    DirectionSylbee Kim
    Performed byHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ with Nicolas Pelzer, Sylbee Kim
    LyricsSylbee Kim, HYENAZ, Nicolas Pelzer
    CostumesJuan Chamié (for EXIT)
    Styling, Objects and InstrumentsYeorg Kronnagel with Rilk Mob
    ProjectionSylbee Kim
    CoordinatorTaejun Kim
    DocumentationSylbee Kim, Seung-Bum Hong, Nico Pelzer
    Supported byKorean Cultural Center, Berlin; Mi-Hyun Park (Gayageum)
  • Cypher

    Cypher

    In Cypher, HYENAZ uphold the hyena—a creature maligned as grotesque—as a totem of queer survival. The work unravels a love story spun through the animal’s mythos: its androgynous physiology, its scavenging, its supposed ugliness as a testament to thriving at the margins.

    Graysister (Dušan Pejčić)’s video distills this ethos into a flesh-and-pixel psalm. The artists’ faces and bodies fuse into a luminous, three-breasted hybrid—part human, part apparition. Limbs and bones blur, and genders dissolve into a radiant monstrosity that defies categorization.

    Through distortion and desire, Cypher weaponizes the hyena’s vilified traits—scavenging becomes resourcefulness, androgyny becomes multiplicity, ugliness becomes a radical self-acceptance. Here, love is not pristine communion but a feral pact.

    Credits

    Music & LyricsHYENAZ
    MixHYENAZ, Bartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    MasteringBartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    VideoDušan Pejčić

  • Sister

    Sister

    In Sister, HYENAZ conjures a visceral dialogue between fusion and fracture. Filmed at Ngannelong (also known as Hanging Rock) the work captures artist Adrienne Teicher in a raw, psychedelic performance that mirrors the destabilizing thrall of longing. The work’s title invokes the eternally deferred ideal of sisterhood: a bond that promises wholeness but may never offer full or lasting consumation. HYENAZ’s soundscape oscillates between ethereal vocal symbiosis and electronic rupture, embodying the ecstatic terror of being both consumed by and estranged from a beloved other.

    While the work does not explicitly address the history of Ngannelong, it is critical to remember that this is a site of profound significance to the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung, and Taungurung peoples, who were violently displaced during the genocidal campaigns of Australia’s frontier wars.

    Credits

    Music & LyricsHYENAZ
    Audio MixHYENAZ, Bartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    Audio MasteringBartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    VideoHYENAZ
  • Scavenge

    Scavenge

    In their 2014 self titled debut, also known as “Scavenge”, HYENAZ imagined themselves as transgender hyena-humanoids, scavenging on the edges of apocalypse, building bodies and identities from civilization’s detritus.

    HYENAZ are one, defiled and immaculate, their androgynous flesh quivering on the thin edge between the digital and the divine. They believe that all beings and matter are intrinsically connected, that we can choose utopia over dystopia, that time is an illusion. The album is written as an infinite circle. An electro-symphony, it is composed not track by track, but as a whole, adapting sounds and samples from around the world and influences from across time. 

    Collage: Isaiah Lopaz / Graphic Design: HYENAZ
    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer · SoundCloud

    Credits

    Music & LyricsHYENAZ
    MixHYENAZ, Bartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    MasteringBartłomiej Kuźniak (Studio333)
    Album ArtworkIsaiah Lopaz
    Graphic DesignHYENAZ