queer

  • 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

  • Audibility

    Featuring Donato Laborante

    In Audibility, HYENAZ delve into the politics of sound, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship to the audible and inaudible, to silence and silencing. Recorded in an ancient man-made cave in the Murgia region of southern Italy, poet Donato Laborante cradles a stalk of Ferula Ferita, his fingers tracing the the fibrous plant ubiquitous to these regions as he delivers an exposition on the different forms of silence. For Laborante, silence is not absence – it is an event.

    BuyBandcamp
    StreamSpotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer

    The sung text which follows–eery, gutteral, raw–connects the silence of spaces to the absence of certain speaking bodies from discourse. It compels the willingness of the listener to hear differently; to tune into those voices which are absent, to make absence something worth listening to. This is not about giving voice to the voiceless, of incorporating unheard voices into already established patterns of speech and articulation (and their relavent hierarchies). Audibility dreams of a kind of sensory co-practice not yet realised where silence is not a void, but a dynamic and multifaceted presence.

    Credits

    Text, Vocals, Music & VideoKathryn (Roi) Fischer & Adrienne Teicher
    PoemDonato Laborante

  • Pain Can Be A Place

    with Aérea Negrot

    Dates

    2 June 2024IT’S LOVER, LOVE – Wake for Lost Ones, Xposed Film Festival, Aquarium, Berlin

    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.

  • Perimeter

    Dates

    June 3 – July 31 2022Come Alive, Het Nieuwe Muntgebouw, Utrecht
    Buy:Bandcamp
    Stream:Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Tidal · Deezer · SoundCloud

    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?

    Exhibited at Utrecht’s 2022 Come Alive exhibition on sexualities and eroticism, it maps psychic borderlands through five performers confronting their own thresholds.

    Adrienne Teicher navigates the perimeter of her semi-discarded Jewishness, while Mad Kate grapples with the dissonance between an assigned-female body and a nonbinary selfhood. Mmakgosi Kgabi gazed into her complex and distanced relationship with the feeling of joy, and Martini Cherry Furter oscillates between the “authentic” and performed persona. Finally, 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 across the hemispheres of their homes.

    At its core lies a meticulously edited music video—art-directed by Yeorg Kronnagel, cinematography by
    Robert Mleczko—where the artists perform these unstable territories. Their movements, raw yet stylized, reveal how play and trauma coexist in interstitial spaces. The track’s industrial thrum channels Berlin’s underground techno scene, a shared habitat for all five collaborators.

    During the Come Alive exhibition, audiences could access a virtual documentary on their phones in which five concurrent interview screens lay bare the origins of the spectacle. It was in these interviews that the performers uncovered the uneasy territories within their identities, describe in raw detail aspects of themselves which normally lie beneath the surface of awareness. This offered viewers a rare insight into the unglamorous scaffolding of Berlin’s queer performance ecology.

    The soundscape stitches together sonic fragments of displacement: a metal fence scraped on Samothraki’s windswept hills; chatter from a Palermo café; the clatter of a Dunkirk refugee kitchen; Bartłomiej Kuzniak’s saxophone echoing through Czestochowa’s ancient caves; Alex Spree’s clarinet warped into synthetic whispers. Each sample carries the weight of its origin.

    Accompanying the installation, the Perimeter EP features HYENAZ’s original composition alongside remixes by IXA and Maya Postepski aka Princess Century.

    Credits

    Music & ConceptHYENAZ
    PerformersMad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Martini Cherry Furter, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau
    Artistic DirectionYeorg Kronnagel
    CinematographyRobert Mleczko
    Video EditHYENAZ
    SaxophoneBartlomiej Kuzniak
    ClarinetAlex Spree
    RemixesIXA, Maya Postepski (Princess Century)

  • Queering Audibility

    A collaboration with Eyk Kauly and Antkek Engel

    Dates

    11 April 2024 / 20:00Lettrétage in der Veteranenstraße 21
    Deutsch / English / DGS (mit Dolmetschung)

    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 & PerformanceHYENAZ / Eyk Kauly
    CurationAntkek Engel, iQt Berlin
    SupportFranziska Winkler, Handverlesen, Aktion Mensch, iQt, Imaginando

  • 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

  • Chokehole

    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.

    Chokehole screened at New Orleans Film Festival, Outfest and Chicago Underground Film Festival.

    Credits

    DirectorYony Leyser
    Music & Sound DesignHYENAZ
    Sound RecordistsAdrienne Teicher & Kathryn Fischer
    CinematographyShane Thomas McMillan
    EditorRuth Schönegge
    Sound Re-recording MixerCornelius Rapp

  • The Fourth Generation

    Premiere – Vienna Queer Shorts Festival

    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.

    Credits

    Directed and Written byYony Leyser
    Sound DesignHyenaz (Kathryn Fischer & Adrienne Teicher)
    CastAerea Negrot, Gigi Spelsberg, Yvon Jansen, Daniel Zillmann, Mano Thiravong, Mathea Hoffmann, Chilly Gonzales
    CinematographyPaul Faltz
    EditingHamed Mohammadi
    Art DirectorDarko Petrovic
    Production DesignJeff Schaul, Victoria Shved
    Costume DesignAlexis Mersmann

  • Automine

    Dates

    18 May 2024Performatorio, Bergamo, Italy
    12 May 2024Festa Delle Transumanze, Masseria Jesce, Altamura, Italy
    22 September 2023CW / Hive Film Festival
    Flutgraben Berlin
    16 September 2023Bygdapride
    Øystese, Norway
    25-26 May 2022Performing Arts Festival Berlin
    ACUD Theatre Berlin
    18 April 2022Y: N𝙤rmal B𝙤dies
    Divadlo X10
    Prague
    9-10 December 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    ACUD Theatre
    Berlin
    26 September 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    Casa Tranzit, Cluj
    23 September 2021Performance + Artist Talk
    Atelierele Malmaison
    Bucharest, Romania
    16 September 2021
    15 September 2021    		Performance: Cross Attic, Prague
    Artist talk: Synth Library, Prague

    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 pushes their ongoing Foreign Bodies project 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.

    Credits

    TextHYENAZ
    MusicHYENAZ
    Video DesignHYENAZ
    Set DesignMad Kate
    StylingYeorg Kronnagel, Mad Kate
    Costume DesignJuan Chamié (House of EXIT)