HYENAZ

queer

  • Pain Can Be A Place

    with Aérea Negrot

    Presentations

    2nd 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.

  • Queering Audibility (with Eyk Kauly)

    Showings

    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 and Performance: HYENAZ / Eyk Kauly
    Curation: Antkek Engel, iQt Berlin
    With Support from Franziska Winkler, Handverlesen, Aktion Mensch and iQt

  • Audibility

    Featuring Donato Laborante

    Listen: https://listen.music-hub.com/tXVO4g
    Buy: https://hyenazhyenaz.bandcamp.com/track/audibility

    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.

  • Körper Figurationen Welten

    Drei Videos zur Einführung in Queer Theorie: KÖRPER, FIGURATIONEN und WELTEN von Antke A. Engel und Filmfetch (Magda Wystub; Tali Tiller), sound design HYENAZ, with English subtitles

    BODIES. FIGURATIONS. WORLDS: Video introductions to queer theory

    Antke A. Engel und Filmfetch (Magda Wystub; Tali Tiller), FernUniversität Hagen 2021

    The videos (german with english subtitles) are freely available as Open Educational Resources (OER) at the following link: e.feu.de/queer-theory-videos or on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh98rBDWATF6bkxKNvpR4gQ

    Radio Sendung: HYENAZ featured on Gerecht Sprechen – Über die Lust auf Gendersternchen, neue Pronomen und Co.” by Sabine Rolf on BR2. https://www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/nachtstudio/gerecht-sprechen-was-wir-mit-gendersternchen-neuen-pronomen-und-co-gewinnen/1812549?fbclid=IwAR322OFGxSflihKjtyuCWFX5DD4EzdCqMk176SbkkvscssZYntZRtiwvt3o