Sony UWP Dual Wireless Lavalier Microphone system (470.025-542.000MHz): 1 x URX-P03D two channel receiver; 2 x UTX-B40 body pack transmitters; 2 x Sony ECM-V1BMP Lavalier Microphones
membra(I)nes: 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association and Public Program Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
SIGNALS is a new work created especially for Washington DC’s Sound Scene Festival’s 2021 theme EMERGE. Sound Scene Festival is supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Goethe Institut.
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.
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 our Foreign Bodies series.
In 2024, HYENAZ completed the final sections of their monumental ten-year slow movement journey FOREIGN BODIES, a deep sonic and political exploration of management, control, and embodied resistance. Inviting numerous collaborators, academics, and artists to contribute their reflections, they wove voice notes, raw field recordings, and interview highlights into the album Inbetweens, a work that exposes the skeletal structures of sound and process.
Now, in 2025, HYENAZ will present the first live iterations of Inbetweens at Placek Festival in BRNO, bringing this long-form research to the stage in an experimental and immersive performance.
The album and live work are made possible through the contributions of an extraordinary network of artists, scholars, and communities, including:
• Sylbee Kim (multidisciplinary artist) • Sivan Ben Yishai (playwright, writer) • Thomas F. DeFrantz (scholar, choreographer) • MmakgoSi Kgabi (performance artist, actor) • Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau (FILMMAKER, PERFORMER, researcher) • Rodrigo Frenk (sound artist, experimental musician) • TEREZA SILON (PERFORMANCE ARTIST, BODY WORKER) • Imre Szeman (cultural theorist, energy humanities) • Erin Manning (philosopher, movement researcher) • Wayne Atkinson (Yorta Yorta elder, historian) • Ambra Stucchi (BODY WORKER, DANCER, HEALER) • Danilo Andres (CHOREOGRAPHER, DANCER) • Vito Maiulari (ARTIST, SCULPTOR, SOUND RESEARCHER) • Yusuph Suso (kora musician) • Bartłomiej Kuźniak (saxophonist, bassist, producer) • Donato Laborante (PERFORMANCE ARTIST, STORYTELLER) • attendees of the Anarcho-Feminist & Anti-Military Conference • Lorca Miziolek (contributor) • ChoirS and NON HUMAN SOUNDS • Samothraki Sounds • KUBA • Yorta Yorta Community • RKK & Grand-Synthe Camp, Dunkirk • Barmah Lakes
HYENAZ’s research for Inbetweens was made possible by a STIP-III stipendium from Musikfonds, which supported their final compositions for the Foreign Bodies series and their exploration of the sonic potential of stone. A pivotal moment in this research was a journey to the Murgia region of Italy, where they documented interviews with artists, historians, storytellers, biologists, and speleologists, further expanding the sonic and conceptual depth of the project.
Welcome to a living room that turns into a smouldering scene of remembering and forgetting. Here, between a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her daughter, worlds collide: an interplay of anger, sadness, despair and disorientation. What remains when memories fade and the past becomes an unreliable companion?
Damage Done takes the audience on a journey through the fragility of memory and the construction of identity in a world that wants to save everything. The starting point is private video recordings from the family archive that were never intended for the public. But it is precisely this intimate closeness that challenges us to pause and ask questions: What does this material show – and what does it do to us who view it?
Through a collaborative process, the recordings are dissected, reinterpreted and translated into images, movements and dialogues. Alternative forms of communication emerge, transforming the stage into a multi-perspective space in which remembering and forgetting are negotiated in equal measure.
Expressing desire, pursuing dreams, loving oneself, questioning the oppressive confines of patriarchy. Farida Baqi takes us on a lyrical and emotional journey through the life of a young woman from birth to adulthood in an unnamed Arab city.
The moment of birth, the possibilities of childhood, the growing pains of teenage years, the expectations imposed by society on young women: The Visual Feminist Manifesto explores how a woman’s life is crafted by the world around her. We are witness to the ways in which she makes meaning, both from her personal experience and how she is told she must behave, both deeply shaped by patriarchal structures. Repeatedly told that women are “less than”, her behaviour is made small by the threats of shame, fear, and ostracisation. All the while, she is seeking something more emancipatory.
Farida Baqi brings us into the fold through the life of an unnamed woman in an Arab city, homing in on the experience of a cisgender woman making encounters with heterosexual desire. But the filmmaker’s ode will resonate with many, united through universal emotions of joy, pain, love, and frustration.
Contrasting shots depicting the urbanity of an Arab city and the gentle scenery of the seaside, Baqi makes a woman’s life inextricable from the spaces and places around her, all the while hinting at a more liberatory future forged through solidarity.
– Olivia Popp
Credits
Director
Farida Baqi
Music
Mad Kate | the Tide, HYENAZ, Lynn Adib
Sound Design
Studio Mitte, HYENAZ
Screenplay
Farida Baqi
Cinematography
Janne Ebel
Principal cast
Amal el-Hani, Lynn Adib, Rosalie Cella, Gaël Abou Jaoude, Michelle Zallouaa, Norah Toledano, Alice Canzonieri
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.
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 and Performance: HYENAZ / Eyk Kauly Curation: Antkek Engel, iQt Berlin With Support from Franziska Winkler, Handverlesen, Aktion Mensch and iQt
In their audiovisual artwork Audibility, HYENAZ delve into the politics of sound, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to the audible and inaudible, to silence and silencing. Filmed in an ancient man-made cave in the Murgia region of southern Italy, poet Donato Laborante delivers a poetic exploration of different forms of silence(s), holding in his hands the stalk of the Ferula Ferrita plant, an emblem of the Murgia’s unique ecology. The plant’s presence becomes an integral part of the artwork, questioning its animacy and whether it can consent to being part of an artwork.
HYENAZ suggest that audibility is deeply political and involves the willingness of the listener to hear differently; that this process is a mutual co-practice of speaking and listening and challenges the entire sonic environment to relate otherwise. Intertwined with embodied, somatic experiences, this requires a shift in our listening practices. Audibility invites us to engage with silence not as a void, but as a dynamic and multifaceted presence.
This damp and amphibious track extrapolates from field recordings of an immense network of stuttering frogs, which we encountered on Yorta Yorta country in South-Eastern Australia. The frogs reacted to their presence and movement by altering the intensity and volume of their vocalizations, creating an organic techno. The singular texture of PROXIMITY is the result of this collaboration with wetland wildlife.
The frogs’ reaction to their sense of [in]security led us to draw parallels to how physical and emotional proximity affect human societal relations, a concept we explore in the slime-covered video for PROXIMITY. Released by the poetry journal Interim, this visual artwork lurches and staggers across bodies in motion to ask the question, “Does our Proximity Bind Us?”
The movement research for the PROXIMITY video began with the performative installation and praxis PROXIMATE MOVEMENTS, which was first researched during Isabelle Lewis’s immersive spaces exploration at Martin Gropius Bau, which was part of the “Welt Ohne Aussen” festival in 2018. It was later performed at Garbicz Festival Poland with Ambrita Sunshine, Adrienne Teicher, Mad Kate, Federica Dauri, Danilo Andrés, Bishop Black and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau. The movement research around Proximate Movements later evolved into the group CLUSTERFUCK, whom HYENAZ directed and performed with for PEACHES stage show There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle.
This track was particularly rewarding in terms of the field recording process from which it began. One night we were camping on the Barmah Lakes in the lands of the Yorta Yorta nation in south-eastern Australia. We had been invited there by Yorta Yorta elder Professor Wayne Atkinson to go “on country” with a group of students, to learn the cosmology and history of his people and their contemporary struggle for sovereignty over lands that were taken by the settler-colonial nation state.
As twilight settled over the lakes we began to hear these strange clicks and pulses that sounded extraterrestrial, as if some force was mapping the space through sound. We took our recorder out into the marshy wetlands, to try and record this entity, but wherever we were, the sounds were escaping us, it was as if we had a negative force field pushing away whatever this thing was creating these strange sounds. After moving further and further along the banks, but getting no closer to the sound, we decided to stop moving altogether and just listen.
It was then that the sounds began to approach us, gradually coming closer and closer, more and more of these clicks and pulses until we were subsumed within them and we saw, at our feet a tiny, tiny frog pulsating in our torch light.
It’s tempting to think about art as a form of mastery but just as often, creating art is as much about giving up control. Through this experience we realised that sensitivity is at the heart of field recording. The frogs established a set of terms that made it possible for us to share space with them and they also taught us that rather than being in a perpetual state of doing, that sometimes the work is more about un-doing or doing nothing.
The frogs also got us thinking about nearness, safety, and community. How do safety and care shift in relation to physical proximity; how does the grievability, or the extent to which we value and grieve for other lives, change relative to how close we are to them (physically?). What other kinds of proximities exist besides physical ones and how can they be utilised to create networks of care? In the visual work for Proximity, we invited a team of dancers including Adrienne Teicher of HYENAZ alongside Bishop Black, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Danilo Andrés and ROC to explore how closeness—physical proximity—shifts our emotional response to each other.
PROXIMITY is the first in a series of singles, mixed-reality performances and a/v installations entitled Foreign Bodies. The works surface from an ongoing practice of learning from the individuals and communities who move in resistance to, in spite of, and as a result of, the management and control of bodies by nation-states, corporations and other authoritarian actors.
Proximity was first published in Interim 35.2 – The Body Issue – April 2018 and was presented at the Hamburg Short Film Festival 2023
Music, Concept, Design, Styling and Editing: HYENAZ Choreography: Mad Kate Cinematography: Jo Pollux and Raja de Luna Movers: Danilo Andrés, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Bishop Black, ROC, Adrienne Teicher Audio Mastering: Becki Whitton
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
