Welcome to a living room that turns into a smouldering scene of remembering and forgetting. Here, between a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her daughter, worlds collide: an interplay of anger, sadness, despair and disorientation. What remains when memories fade and the past becomes an unreliable companion?
Damage Done takes the audience on a journey through the fragility of memory and the construction of identity in a world that wants to save everything. The starting point is private video recordings from the family archive that were never intended for the public. But it is precisely this intimate closeness that challenges us to pause and ask questions: What does this material show – and what does it do to us who view it?
Through a collaborative process, the recordings are dissected, reinterpreted and translated into images, movements and dialogues. Alternative forms of communication emerge, transforming the stage into a multi-perspective space in which remembering and forgetting are negotiated in equal measure.
Expressing desire, pursuing dreams, loving oneself, questioning the oppressive confines of patriarchy. Farida Baqi takes us on a lyrical and emotional journey through the life of a young woman from birth to adulthood in an unnamed Arab city.
The moment of birth, the possibilities of childhood, the growing pains of teenage years, the expectations imposed by society on young women: The Visual Feminist Manifesto explores how a woman’s life is crafted by the world around her. We are witness to the ways in which she makes meaning, both from her personal experience and how she is told she must behave, both deeply shaped by patriarchal structures. Repeatedly told that women are “less than”, her behaviour is made small by the threats of shame, fear, and ostracisation. All the while, she is seeking something more emancipatory.
Farida Baqi brings us into the fold through the life of an unnamed woman in an Arab city, homing in on the experience of a cisgender woman making encounters with heterosexual desire. But the filmmaker’s ode will resonate with many, united through universal emotions of joy, pain, love, and frustration.
Contrasting shots depicting the urbanity of an Arab city and the gentle scenery of the seaside, Baqi makes a woman’s life inextricable from the spaces and places around her, all the while hinting at a more liberatory future forged through solidarity.
– Olivia Popp
Credits
Director
Farida Baqi
Music
Mad Kate | the Tide, HYENAZ, Lynn Adib
Sound Design
Studio Mitte, HYENAZ
Screenplay
Farida Baqi
Cinematography
Janne Ebel
Principal cast
Amal el-Hani, Lynn Adib, Rosalie Cella, Gaël Abou Jaoude, Michelle Zallouaa, Norah Toledano, Alice Canzonieri
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 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
READING AND DISCUSSING TOGETHER. This reading group is especially oriented towards reading together rather than reading outside the group. We hope that this close reading strategy can be a small act of resistance against the cultural colonization of Western academia, the hegemony of English, and the codified distinctions between the academic and the “non-academic” or the artist. There is no commitment to join for more than one session. Non academics who want to involve critical theory in their work but normally don’t have access to text based resources or the time to do research are encouraged to take part. We also make space for defining and translating words for non-native speakers who don’t have access to translations into their home language(s).
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM investigates how extractive processes (environmental, intellectual, and physical) are replicated within the performing and in particular the sonic arts. The concept of extractivism situates all kinds of “innocent practices” as carrying the potential for exploitation and harm. We use extractivism in order to problematise a number of related phenomena—from the environmental extracation of minerals, gas and water from the ground, we expand to include the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies, the recording of sounds, words, ideas and images from sentient beings, as well as the “mining of the exotic” in terms of content branding and other new economies from our very selves.
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM explores the following questions: What are the problematics of extraction which appear within (always-already) hierarchical collaborations? How can processes compromised by extractive dynamics resist extraction? How can we name them, rather than erase them? What are the limitations of the extractivist framework? Are there other ways of finding reciprocal relations between artists, subjects, and nature?
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM itself should resist extractivist practices by reaching towards collective practice, whereby each member chooses one text (one chapter or short text selection) that they feel could shed light on the topic. We will read the text together, rather than outside of the group, and discuss the text within the meeting time. Since it is assumed that members of the group are not supported financially to spend time researching, or in general supported by arts or academic institutions, the group aims towards generating conversation and thought that can be useful towards our work and not become extractive labour.
To that end, ART AND EXTRACTIVISM is also geared towards non-academics who wish to involve critical theory in their work. The idea of the group is to provide a safe space to discuss critical theory outside of established spheres of audibility (i.e., the academic classroom) and to create an environment where those who generally think of themselves as non-academics can interact with critical theory without the pressure of competing or keeping up with others’ knowledges. We will work towards establishing dialogue amongst artists and workers who would like to engage with some of the body of academic work which has been done “about” the worker or the artist, and see how we can relate it to our everyday and real world experiences. In this sense we attempt to resist the extractivist practice that theory engages on the body of the worker or artist.
RESOURCES
SOME OF THE BOOKS that we are reading include:
Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism – Martin Arboleda
The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han
Freedom, Justice and Decolonization – Lewis R. Gordon
Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis – Katherine McKittrick, Editor
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect – Mel Y. Chen
The Promise of Happiness – Sarah Ahmed
Hunting&Collecting – Sammy Baloji
On the Post Colony – Achille Mbembe
Necropolitics – Achille Mbembe
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None – Kathryn Yusoff
On Inhumanity – David Livingstone Smith
Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements – Julietta Singh
Imperial Mud – James Boyce
Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador – Thea Riofrancos
On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis – Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives – Macarena Gómez-Barris
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World – Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Medusa wird im Mythos vom Gott der Meere vergewaltigt, woraufhin sie sich in eine geflügelte Gestalt mit Schlangenhaaren verwandelt, deren Anblick jeden zu Stein erstarren lässt. Medusas gewaltvolle, kaleidoskopisch angelegten Memoiren sind bei Sivan Ben Yishai eine Widmung an alle Liebenden, die Momente unserer kollektiven Erinnerung auflistet: zwischen Begehren und Gewalt, zwischen Porno und sexuellen Fantasien, zwischen politischen Attacken und familiär eingeübtem Wegschauen. In einem nur scheinbaren Gegenszenario imaginieren fünf junge Mädchen gemeinsam den Traummann ihrer Zukunft, sich selbst unwillkürlich als perfektes Attribut an seiner Seite. Auf einer dritten Erzählspur entwirft die Autorin eine buchstäbliche Umkehrdynamik der tradierten Erzählmuster:
Eine Frau greift zum Messer, verlässt den Tatort Ehebett, kapert einen vollbesetzten Bus und legt den Rückwärtsgang ein, um die Jahrhundert-Story-Lines und all das zerschundene menschliche Liebesfleisch einzusammeln und zu dekompostieren. Könnte es nicht zum Humus werden für eine Öko-Sphäre der feministischen Narrative?
As sound artists we make and take recordings. Can we talk about extracting minerals from a landscape and extracting sounds in the same breath? Are they manifestations of the same phenomenon? In what ways are they the same and in what ways are they different.
Extracting minerals is removing something from a landscape leaving behind a scar. We found ourselves in such a scar when we were taken by a collection of men from a town in Southern Italy to a marble quarry. We descended, and at the base we bashed stones and made recordings. We took metal pieces and thrashed them against a wall of rock.
Extracting sounds from a landscape in this way leaves the landscape physically in the same state as before one entered it. In that sense, extracting sounds is not quite the same as extracting minerals, for it is not the material that is taken, but a copy of it. A sound is produced, and the recording is a facsimile from which more and more copies can be made.
So should we think of this as an act of extraction? When a painter paints a landscape, are they extracting from the landscape. My gut tells me no, but does not tell me precisely why. Perhaps it depends on the painter. If this painter opens themselves so much to the landscape that their consciousness merges with it, in the painting of it, is that extraction? It seems much more like the beginning of an ethical relationship, for the merging of the consciousness and landscape would only be possible through the presence of care.
Is it possible to care for a landscape in the same way as one cares for a person? In existentialism, care flows from something known as “irreplaceability”. Love and friendship flows from the fact that this person is not exchangeable for another. When a friend or lover dies, the presence of another friend or lover can console, but cannot replace the being whose absence rips a hole in the self.
The destruction of landscapes can also produce feelings of melancholia of a similar tenor as the loss of human beings. the destruction of a place is never satiated by the existence of another place. As such, places are irreplaceable.
There are other ways that we treat beings as irreplaceable, not only in the acute phase of mourning them when they die or in some other way leave our lives. We form ethical relations with the things that we love. As bell hooks reminds us, love and abuse cannot coexist. When I act out of love I act out of reciprocity and responsibility. this reciprocity and responsibility has temporal dimensions too. I am not only here for you today, but I am here for you tomorrow as well. Though we each seek our freedom in friendship and love, we are still bound, and these binds give our freedom meaning, in the same way that light gives darkness meaning, as presence is to absence.
So to treat a place from which I take a sound as I would treat a person who I love would imply that I have an ongoing relationship with them, that we are bound somehow. So if I record the sounds of a quarry, already a somehow traumatised space, i am somehow responsible to that quarry, to the people who were there with me, to the stones. How rarely, in my artistic practice, have I lived up to these binds of friendship and love.
How can we manifest this responsibility and reciprocity to both the human and non-human others with whom the act of gathering sounds brings us into contact.
It could very easily become mere protocol.
“Did you get all the email addresses?”
“What are the GPS coordinates of this space? Write them down. Drop a pin.”
“What is the history of this place. Is it on Wikipedia?”
None of these acts are bad, or the opposite of love, but if merely protocol, then they will not contribute to an ethical relationship between artist and place.
Kate has been writing about consent, about what it means to consent to an act. And we learned through etymology that at least in the past, in its Latin form, this word implied “feeling with”. Whether or not this is the contemporary meaning of consent does not matter, for this insight shines a light on how to separate the mere performance of gaining consent, or of any act of responsibility or reciprocity, from one which is authentic. And that is the dimension of feeling.
Feeling is something which cannot take a contract form, nor be enclosed by a map, because the map is not the territory, and the territory shifts beneath our feet. A feeling of care is never the same from one moment to the next, between this entity and another, in this place, or that place, now or then. Only when you feel it, will you know you are truly there.
What utility could this feeling of care have? Would it stay in the domain of the private or does it have political valencies as well? What could be said to be changed, if I have an ethical relationship to a stone, versus having a non-ethical relationship. For one thing, a truly ethical relationship with a stone could not be commodifiable, because that would be to thingify it, and thus remove the possibility of reciprocity. This is hard, for artists, embedded in capitalistic modes of production, but nevertheless, this entails that I cannot privatise it, not even my copy of it, or my copy of my copy of it. The act of art becomes necessarily and act of resistance to capitalism. The extent to which I commodify this interlocutor in my artistic practice is the extent to which i treat it as a commodity, that is I imply that it is replaceable and as replaceable has no value beyond its commodity value, its exchangeability. I want to breathe life into the stone, but the stone becomes a zombie.
There must be other ways, there must be, that are hard to fathom, but the mental reaching for these other ways, that is the point, that is the point, that is the point.
Perhaps it is our way of carving up the world in order to make sense of it, that is what allows me to see not only the stone as replaceable with other stones, but even the stone as stone, and the stone not as part of a rock wall, as part of the rise and fall of mountains and oceans, the enclosure and retreat of glaciers. It is as “mere stone” that I do not see it as intimately connected somehow to the pick that wrenched it from the wall, the hands that held the pick, the hands to the body, the body to the mind, the self; this being who carved the stone from the rock wall yesterday or a hundred years ago perhaps they also stood in wonderment at the world of things around her wondered to herself, where do i end, and where does the world begin? And I through the stone that I drop and record the sound of the dropping stone on the ground am connected to this person. This person I touch somehow when i hold the stone. Yet I am only connected to the stone, and this person, and the landscape and the animals, and the water, and the wind and the journey this stone took from densely compressed hydrogen in a star to densely compressed carbon on the earth, when I do not regard this stone as replaceable.
If i regarded everything “in this light”, would I not risk overload. Is it not also the fact that the concept of “irreplaceable” is possible only through the concept of “replaceable.” Would i not then fall, crumpled, in a heap, exhausted, trying to sense the infinite life-journey of every object and its nexus of interconnections to every other life object, who are all part of a vast meta-object, and themselves divisible into an infinity of micro-objects. If I saturated myself in awareness of everything and everyone i came into contact with, would I not risk falling into a river of flux from which no forms can emerge and therefore, no responsibility or reciprocity, no friendship or love.
Perhaps the solution then we can find in the metaphor of a waveform, which pulsates between two poles. Perhaps I need to embrace a waveform like existence in which one flows in and out of this awareness, where everything exists to me as potentially irreplaceable, but as I am only a window to the world (and not the world itself, and this window is slowly closing), maybe its enough to awaken this sense of irreplaceability selectively and temporarily.
Maybe this is an answer to the question: What is art? To regard the world, and all its things as irreplaceable, and pull back just at that moment where I might lose myself completely, so that making art is a dance on the precipice of self-annihilation, a precipice that is a fundamental point of tension through which my relation to the world, my relation to others, is manifested, as we used to say, by always grasping but never reaching our height of gnosis.
It is a hard process, perhaps a painful one to slip in and out of this awareness, but that is what it is to be a paradox, to be both a part of the whole and the whole at the same time. Neither of these natures can ever erase the other, and instead I float in between, like phases of the moon.
