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.
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.
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
As artists and researchers, we are constantly exploring the connections between art, the environment, and labour rights. Interviews from our ongoing Extraction project were broadcast as part of Mad Kate’s S.W.E.A.T. podcast.
In March 2023 we had the opportunity to interview Donato Laborante, who we met during our tour of the Murgia region of Italy in 2015. As well as being a curator, Donato is a poet, actor, performer and storyteller who galvanizes the artistic scene to create happenings and to move people to take political action in their everyday actions. During one of our visits, we made a journey into a marble quarry in Apricena, and were joined by several local artists who spontaneously began playing percussive sounds on the wall of the quarry. It was this moment that sparked our interest in the idea of extraction as metasignfier–including the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; minerals, gas and water from the ground; sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the exotic” from our very identities. Our third visit to the area allowed us to deepen our understanding of the relationship between stone, sound, and time.
February 2023 featured an interview with Professor Imre Szeman, the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. During the interview, he shared his insights on defining extractivism, the role of the artist in using the term, the use and limitation of regarding everything as animate, and greenwashing. From 2021-2022, he was the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada. He is co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, which explores the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change, and the leader of After Oil, a collective which has produced After Oil (West Virginia University Press, 2016) and Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). He is the author of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (WVUP, 2019) and is working on The Future of the Sun, a book detailing corporate and state control of the transition to renewables.
May 2023 featured an interview with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz in conversation with HYENAZ in the context of our project on art and cultures of extraction. Together we talk about time, Black aesthetics, NOWness and the processes of building creative encounters. Thomas F. DeFrantz teaches at Northwestern University and directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
S.W.E.A.T. airs on Colaboradio Free Radios Berlin Brandenburg – 88.4fm in Berlin, 90.7fm in Potsdam, and streaming at FR-BB.org. Afterwards its available for streaming from your podcast app.
ACT is a project initiated by 10 cultural operators from 10 European countries, working in the field of performing and visual arts. ACT is a project with the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
In 2023 a group of artists and performers gathered in Skopje, North Macedonia for a program organised by the NGO Lokomotiva. HYENAZ represented the Kampnagel theatre in Hamburg.
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.
Selected Festivals
Premiere – Vienna Queer Shorts Festival
Credits
Directed and Written by: Yony Leyser Sound Design: Hyenaz (Kathryn Fischer & Adrienne Teicher) Cast: Aerea Negrot, Gigi Spelsberg, Yvon Jansen, Daniel Zillmann, Mano Thiravong, Mathea Hoffmann, Chilly Gonzales Cinematography: Paul Faltz Editing: Hamed Mohammadi Art Director: Darko Petrovic Production Design: Jeff Schaul, Victoria Shved Costume Design: Alexis Mersmann
