Are you a musician who wants to deepen their practice in somatics? An activist who wants to explore field recording and the politics of sound? A performer, filmmaker, or artist who wants to create soundscapes for their works?
HYENAZ Techniques for Auditory Resistance is not only a workshop in sound design, electronic music production, and field recording, it is an invitation to create works of soundart shaped by the life-worlds of those who gather.
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For HYENAZ, sounds are also bodies: interconnected, multiple, animate. Neither mine nor yours, we encounter sound within a field of power. Through the embodied and unceasing practice of encountering sound as alive, HYENAZ have gathered countless techniques for un-thinking mastery over sound. This is an invitation to share these techniques with you and to invite you to considering the animacies of sound as you work with it as both material and agency.
With HYENAZ you will learn techniques to record the soundscapes and objects of the urban and natural environment, tactics for un/doing the extractive tendencies of artistic practices, methodologies for archiving and text writing, skills to mix and transform these sounds with an attitude of play using a DAW such as Bitwig or Ableton, and finally the confidence to give these works heft through experimental writing and movement exercises.
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.
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.
