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 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
With funding from Fonds Darstellende Künste and Musikfonds, we are researching “extraction” as metasignifier—we include 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.
Ex Situ is a project of HYENAZ and Yusuph Suso, with the work of Lau Bau and Rodrigo Frenk. It is an audiovisual sculpture, a music video and a evolving interactive artwork you can contribute to with your phone or laptop. The work maps the fragile technological threads from which human beings conduct transdimensional lives in past, current and future homelands.
The sculpture consists of a network of scratched and damaged mobile phones counterbalanced against one another as they levitate in space. Each phone loops an audiovisual element at random intervals to generate a musical narrative that is shifting, changing and moving from one moment to the next.
The work is inspired by Maxine Burkett’s concept of a “Nation Ex-Situ” 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.
Wherever human beings are in transit, clusters of phones around power banks and electrical outlets can be observed. Phones help us stay connected to where we come from, where we are and where we are going. They help us navigate and they even become a site of home when they contain all your family and friends inside of them. In these contexts, having electricity and having data is gold.
The phones in Ex Situ carry images and sounds Gambian singer Yusuph Suso whom Hyenaz met on a dusty road to an immigration detention centre on the outskirts of Trapani in Sicily. As part of their ongoing Foreign Bodies project, Hyenaz were mapping the phenomenon of human bodies in motion and the ways that governments and other actors regulate, instrumentalise and profit from this phenomenon. Yusuph, a former refugee, was there to act as an interpreter for migrants navigating the bureaucratic intricacies of the Italian migration system.
In this serendipitous encounter, Yusuph revealed he is a singer from a long line of court musicians stretching back to the ancient kingdom of Mali. A week later the three artists recorded a series of interviews in English and vocals in Mandinka. Shortly thereafter, Yusuph sent a set of videos from a visit home to Gambia, which he recorded on his phone.
These musical and visual elements were sampled and transmogrified by Hyenaz and each given their own place on one of the phones hanging from the sculpture. As free movement not only a human right but increasingly a human necessity, anyone with access to a smartphone or computer can contribute their own stories of home and migration which are integrated into the sculpture.
By drawing us into a collective hive of dreams and memories, Ex Situ reminds us of the importance of connection even as lifeworlds sink, dissolve, or are displaced.
Along with the gallery installation and launch of the web interface, Ex Situ also manifests as a video and EP, with a remix by Sky Deep.
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?
Perimeter was exhibited at Come Alive – a multidisciplinary immersive exhibition on sexualities and eroticism at Het Nieuwe Muntgebouw in Utrecht in 2022.
Adrienne Teicher chose the perimeter of her semi-discarded Jewishness; Mad Kate delved into their relationship with her assigned-female body and sisterhood; Mmakgosi Kgabi explored her complex relationship with the feeling of joy; Martini Cherry Furter danced between notions of the “real” and “performative” self and 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 in each of their homes.
The core of the work is a sharply cut music video, with stunning artistic direction by Yeorg Kronnagel and cinematography by Robert Mleczko, wherein the five artists perform these unstable territories. What they create with their bodies is emotionally raw, yet hyperstylised, allowing visitors to the gallery to witness how playfulness can emerge even in territories which are traumatic. The music elicits associations with the underground techno scene of the city of Berlin in which all five performers live.
Presented around this nucleus is an interview with each of the artists, which play simultaneously on five separate screens. It was in these interviews that HYENAZ and their collaborators discovered and elaborated their perimeters, giving themselves space to describe in careful detail, aspects of their existence which normally live beneath the surface of awareness. This gives visitors the unique opportunity to look inside, and behind and beyond the subculture of queer performance in Berlin.
PERIMETER was composed in Bitwig on Ubuntu Linux. The field recordings were collected on slow movement journeys of volunteering and research for FOREIGN BODIES, a project about bodies in relation to each other, bodies in motion, bodies in repulsion and attraction, bodies in migration, bodies in resistance to management and control.
Every sound is built from field recordings … a scrap of metal against a metal fence atop a hill in Samothraki… a busy cafe in Palermo, speaking to our collaborator and fellow musician Yusuph Suso … the sounds of labour in a refugee aid kitchen in Dunkirk… saxophone samples by Bartłomiej Kuźniak from an ancient cave in Częstochowa … clarinet samples from Alex Spree in Berlin initially recorded for Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. All the layers of this composition have a story that we will not forget.
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 brings together performative and audio-visual work that has been developed through Foreign Bodies, a 7-year long research project that explores relationships of bodies in motion, bodies in relation, and bodies in resistance. Through the visceral and explicit body, HYENAZ interrogate mechanisms that treat the body as a foreign object—a thing to be managed and controlled, an unknown territory even to itself, an “other” to be feared or annihilated.
Central to this project is the idea that the body is disappearing: from social interactions blasted into the corporate cloud, to machine intelligence tangled in the systems that govern life, to techno-futurists fantasies of an age where analogue flesh has vanished into digital consciousness. At this uncanny juncture, where surfaces look familiar but everything is shifting, HYENAZ claw to the presence of the body and the knowledge contained therein.
AUTOMINE pushes Foreign Bodies 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.
Lines That Maintain a violent order / Lines that distinguish a violent event / Those lines do not hold / The forest floor / Leaves like our bodies / Scattered in time
Our nostrils full of earth / Leaves decay / White lines / Feet march / Lines our bodies form / Are scattered by time / Day is gone / Its heat Is gone / Its sounds gone / As all things return / To stillness
Columns is a response to militarized violence and to History, specifically the historicising mode which focuses on events and important persona, while blurring events and persona deemed unimportant or inconsequential. Though the track sounds like industrial techno, it is built entirely from vocalizations and organic percussion recorded deep within a cave outside the pilgrimage town of Częstochowa, Poland, with Bartłomiej Kuźniak. It is second in the series of audio visual works and performance interventions entitled Foreign Bodies; works that emerge from the sonic shapeshifting of field recordings gathered in refugee camps, migrant transit centers, ancient stations on paths of pilgrimage, indigenous grounds, and intentional communities. These are places where bodies have been explicitly managed, controlled, feared and annihilated.
The single, “Columns” is out on Canadian techno label OBSKUR MUSIC, with remixes by Lady Maru, Bad Conscience, Consumer Refund and NVRS. The video, created in collaboration with Xenia Østergård Ramm and Old Erik from the Hackstage artist collective, was produced using analogue video processing to deconstruct footage of stalactites, trees and wind turbines collected in the caves of the Harz Mountains.
Against societal trends to dismiss the body in favour of automation, AI, and digital existence, KNOWBODY investigates the presence and absence of the body and the knowledge contained therein. The investigation is done through the performance of the body and the presence of the body in performance. “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 – allows us to rediscover the immanent territory of the flesh.
