aliveness

  • Animacies

    Dates

    17 December 2025Room to Raise – KWIA – Berlin, Germany
    3 August 2025Fundraiser for Clean Shelter, Gaza – Kunsthaus Kule, Berlin
    4 July 2025Transforma Festival, Tabor, Czechia
    8 May 2025Placek Festival, Brno, Czechia
    Photo: Vojtěch Šoula

    With Animacies, HYENAZ stage their 10 years of Foreign Bodies research and musical compositions, giving them form in large part through interactive performance scores developed during their 2023 residency at Hamburg’s Kampnagel theatre. These scores operate as live co-creations: through which those gathered are challenged to experience the aliveness of the objects that populate psychic life–for instance, the phones breathing in our pockets, the scarves coiled around our neck–as well as the invisible relationships to other humans that condense within these objects – the many hands that follow an object from its origins as raw materials into the seemingly “finished” entity that we “own”. HYENAZ also invite their audience to sit with the (discomfort) of the micro-interactions we perform with each other in shared spaces as rehearsals of power.

    The work refuses the tyranny of distancing, through which the aliveness of other entities vanishes beyond the horizon because we cannot physically experience them in our immediate environment. In what ways does proximity and distance make it possible for wars to continue without end, and for the satanic mills of capitalism to grind on into a cascade of mass extinction events.

    These choreographies of care and complicity refuse the notion of presence and absence, action and passivity: we are always choosing to tune in or to tune out, to act or avoid. Tuning into the aliveness of objects–and of each other–is one way of returning a sense of radical responsibility to humans in a world that seems out of their control.

  • Eaten by the Waves: Taking Sound in an Age of Extraction

    9 May 2025Placek Festival, Brno, Czechia

    Sound is never neutral—it is woven into fabrics of space, power, consent, and history. In this immersive six-hour workshop, artists HYENAZ guide participants through deep listening, field recording, and sound mapping as radical practices of attunement. Through hands-on exercises, discussion, and sonic experimentation, we explore how sound shapes our perception of place, storytelling, and agency in an era of extraction.

    Participants engage in:

    • Embodied Deep Listening — Attuning to the politics of frequency and vibration
    • Ethical Field Recording Tactics — Capturing soundscapes as acts of custodianship, not conquest
    • Alchemical Sound Design — Morphing found audio into musique concrète and speculative atmospheres using open source software
    • Sonic Storytelling — Weaving raw recordings into narratives of place and displacement

    Credits

    Workshop Concept, Design and ExecutionHYENAZ

  • Proximity

    DATES

    08 & 10 June 2023Hamburg Short Film Festival (Screening)
    04 August 2018Garbicz Festival (Performance)
    25 July 2018Martin Gropius Bau (Research Intervention)

    This amphibious work extrapolates from field recordings of an immense frog chorus encountered by HYENAZ on Yorta Yorta Country in southeastern Australia. The frogs reacted to the artists’ presence and movement by modulating their vocalizations’ intensity and volume, generating an organic techno pulse. PROXIMITY’s singular texture emerges from this interspecies collaboration with wetland wildlife.

    The amphibians’ responses to perceived [in]security led HYENAZ to draw parallels between ecological reactivity and human social dynamics—a concept visceralized in the track’s slime-coated video. The visual work lurches across bodies in motion to ask: “Does Our Proximity Bind Us?”

    Proximity was first published in Interim 35.2 – The Body Issue in April 2018. Movement research for PROXIMITY originated in HYENAZ’s Proximate Movements praxis, first developed during Isabelle Lewis’s immersive spaces exploration at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau as part of Welt Ohne Aussen festival in 2018. Later iterations at Garbicz Festival involved collaborators Ambrita Sunshine, Adrienne Teicher, Mad Kate, Federica Dauri, Danilo Andrés, Bishop Black, and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau. This research eventually coalesced into CLUSTERFUCK, the collective HYENAZ directed for PEACHES’ There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle.

    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify

    The track’s genesis proved revelatory. While camping at Barmah Lakes on Yorta Yorta Country—invited by Elder Professor Wayne Atkinson to learn his community’s cosmology and ongoing sovereignty struggles—HYENAZ documented twilight’s descent. As darkness pooled across waterways, extraterrestrial clicks and pulses emerged, seemingly mapping space through sound. Venturing into marshes with recorders, the duo found sounds retreating from their approach like negative force fields. Only upon stillness did the source reveal itself: tiny frogs throbbing in torchlight, their chorus swelling as HYENAZ surrendered pursuit.

    This encounter underscored HYENAZ’s belief that field recording demands sensitivity over mastery. The frogs dictated terms of cohabitation, teaching the artists that creation often involves undoing—a radical receptivity to nonhuman agency.

    The experience also catalyzed HYENAZ’s inquiry into proximity’s paradoxes: how safety and grievability (the capacity to mourn lives) fluctuate with physical nearness; how alternative proximities might forge care networks beyond geography. For the PROXIMITY video, HYENAZ collaborated with dancers Adrienne Teicher, Bishop Black, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Danilo Andrés, and ROC to choreograph closeness’s visceral grammar.

    As the inaugural work in HYENAZ’s Foreign Bodies series—encompassing mixed-reality performances and A/V installations—PROXIMITY exemplifies their practice of learning from communities resisting bodily control by nation-states and capital.

    Credits

    Music, Concept, Design, Styling & EditingHYENAZ
    ChoreographyMad Kate
    CinematographyJo Pollux and Raja de Luna
    MoversDanilo Andrés, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Bishop Black, ROC, Adrienne Teicher