Tag: sound art

Dates

Ex Situ is a collaborative project between HYENAZ, Gambian griot descendant Yusuph Suso, with technical assistance from Lau Bau and Rodrigo Frenk. The work manifests as an audiovisual sculpture, generative music video, and evolving interactive artwork accessible via smartphone or laptop—a cartography of the fragile technological threads tethering transdimensional lives across past, present, and future homelands.

The sculpture’s core comprises a levitating network of scratched mobile phones counterbalanced in midair. Each device loops randomized audiovisual fragments, generating an ever-shifting musical narrative. This kinetic architecture draws inspiration from Maxine Burkett’s “Nation Ex-Situ” concept, which advocates for the associative rights of diasporic peoples which highlights the rights to association of the growing number of people who have lost the physical location of their former homes, but who maintain bonds nonetheless as they roam across disparate locations.

From their Foreign Bodies research, HYENAZ observed how human beings in movement often orbit clusters of phones and power banks—digital hearths glowing with the embers of family and memory. Our devices locate us where we come from, where we are, and where we are going.

In Ex Situ, these devices carry imagery and audio of Suso, whom the collective met en route to a Sicilian detention center. A former refugee, Suso was there to act as an interpreter for migrants navigating the bureaucratic intricacies of the Italian migration system. WIthin moments, Suso shared his identity as a griot, a descendant from a long lineage of court musicians stretching back to the Malian empire.

Following this serendipitous encounter, the trio recorded interviews and vocals in Mandinka and English. Suso later shared smartphone footage from Gambia—raw materials HYENAZ transmuted into sonic/visual shards distributed across the suspended phones. The work invites global contributors to add migration stories via digital interfaces, asserting free movement as both human right and survival imperative.

As gallery installation, video EP (featuring a Sky Deep remix), and participatory web platform, Ex Situ draws us into a collective hive of dreams and memories, that the drive to phone home persists even as lifeworlds sink, dissolve, or are displaced.

Credits