”HYENAZ: ENTANGLEMENT” is a VR experience that invites participants to explore their own entanglements with objects, landscapes, and extractive processes, with HYENAZ as their guide. In a fantastical environment—immersed in soundscapes and textures recorded through HYENAZ’s slow-movement research project in sites of environmental extraction—objects reveal their animacy, and participants are invited to engage in speculative storytelling to deepen their understanding of interrelationality.
(Multichannel spatial audio, series of videos, interactive elements)
membra(I)nes: 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
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 Foreign Bodies, commissioned by Sound Scene Festival, Washington DC in 2021, with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Goethe Institut.
Audibility – an audio visual work by HYENAZ featuring Donato Laborante
In their audiovisual artwork Audibility, sound and movement artists Kathryn Fischer and Adrienne Teicher (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 the animacy of non-human and even non-animal; inviting into our consciousness this plant’s ability to speak, and more importantly–to provide 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. This is intertwined with embodied, somatic experiences, requiring a shift in our listening practices and a willingness to embrace the subtle nuances of sound and language.
Audibility invites us to engage with silence not as a void, but as a dynamic and multifaceted presence. HYENAZ implore us to listen attentively, to seek out the whispered voices that emerge from the depths of silence–even to hear silence as something other than what we think it is–and to recognize the profound interplay between sound and silence in shaping our understanding of the world.
Through their rigorous processes of deep listening and field recording, HYENAZ capture the inherent sonic richness of their environment, transforming these raw sounds into a tapestry of auditory experiences. Their work encourages us to question the neutrality of sound archiving, recognizing the transformative power of manipulating and reinterpreting recorded sounds.
HYENAZ posit that archived sounds, whether human, non-human, animate, or inanimate, acquire a new existence, becoming intersubjective entities with the potential to give or withhold consent. They advocate for a respectful approach towards the auditory realm, acknowledging the agency of each sound source and its place within the broader sonic landscape.
Text: Mel Y. Chen “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect” Next Sessions:
Monday 4 July 2022 at 16:30 – Hopscotch Auxiliary Room (Gerichtstrasse 45, Berlin) and online Monday 11 July 2022 at 16:30 – Hopscotch Auxiliary Room (Gerichtstrasse 45, Berlin) and online
Join us as we read Mel Y. Chen “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect”.
ABOUT THE TEXT
“In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal.”
OUR APPROACH
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).
WHAT WE EXPLORE
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
HYENAZ (Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher) are currently engaged in a series of discussions and close reading groups, a continuation of the research for their audio-visual work and performative intervention EXTRACTION, the fifth in their “Foreign Bodies” project. Extraction explores how extractive processes are replicated within the arts, and how we can find ways to resist and mediate those processes. The initial research phase of this project began in June 2021 and was generously funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste. More information about their process can be found here.
The project began with our field work in a rock quarry in Apricena, Italy, where we gathered sounds, images and writing. This scar in the earth – both beautiful and disturbing – illuminated our role as artists in a society structured by extractive forms of capitalism. To develop a performative response, we will focus on accountability practices and proactive techniques to resist extractivist practices—especially looking inwards at the way in which gathering sound can be fundamentally extractive.
The concept of extraction situates all kinds of “innocent practices” as carrying the potential for exploitation and harm. We use 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, as well as the “mining of the exotic” from our very selves. In response we ask: 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?
We want to especially thank Donato, Maria-Teresa and the community in and around Apricena, Italy.
Signals is a work by HYENAZ created for DC Sound Scene Festival’s 2021 theme EMERGE, with support from Goethe-Institut DC. Signals explores the notion of performativity in codes, signs, drag, languages, knowledges and masks that allow ((some)) bodies to emerge as visible.
Signals are methods of translation, channels through which some voices become audible and understood. Bodies emerge into forms which are recognized and codified; modes through which some bodies 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.
What is the process of emergence, through which some bodies become visible and audible? 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 part of HYENAZ Foreign Bodies Series, a slow movement journey and process of creating audio visual works which respond to the control, management, resistance and relational positions of bodies to each other.
Ex Situ is a multimedia performance, interactive sonic sculpture and audiovisual work which explores how human beings can exist in past, current and future homeland(s), simultaneously and the fragile technological threads on which this multidimensional existence is suspended.
The work is partly inspired by Maxine Burkett’s notion of a “Nation Ex-Situ” – a nation of stateless people no longer able to live in their physical homelands – highlights the growing number of people who have lost the physical location of their former home but maintain bonds despite living in disparate location(s) and home(s).
The origins of this sculpture lie on a dusty road leading to an immigration detention centre on the outskirts of Trapani in Sicily where the artists Hyenaz and Yusuph Suso first encountered each other. As part of their Foreign Bodies project, Hyenaz were attempting to map the physical and intellectual structures that manifest around the phenomenon of human bodies in motion and migration and the countervailing attempts of governments and other actors to regulate, instrumentalise and profit from this phenomenon.
Yusuph on the other hand was acting as an interpreter for migrants navigating the bureaucratic and legal intricacies of the Italian migration system, a system that he had himself navigated a few years earlier.
In the few minutes that he could spare, Yusuph explained a little of his journey from Gambia, and that he was a singer from a long line of court musicians stretching back to the ancient kingdom of Mali. A week later the three artists met in Palermo and made a set of recordings – both interviews in English and vocals in Mandinka. In the months that followed, Yusuph sent a set of videos from a visit home to Gambia that he made on his phone.
Hyenaz remediated this archive of video and audio recordings into a levitating sound sculpture. The sculpture is comprised of a network of scratched and damaged mobile phones, counterbalanced against one another in space. Each phone loops a sound and visual element at random intervals to generate a sonic artwork that is never the same in any given moment.
Visitors are able to contribute their own stories of movement, motion and migration through a web interface accessible by smartphone or computer and their words are musically transformed and integrated into the sculpture.
By drawing us into a hive of dreams and memories Ex Situ reminds us of the importance of connection even as human 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.
