Discovering Your Sound Cosmology: A Guest Lecture at Tohono O’odham Community College
Facilitated by Mad Kate as part of Eryka Dellenbach’s Video 1 course at TOCC, this guest lecture introduced students at Tohono O’odham Community College to deep listening, contextual sound mapping, and the ethics of field recording. Rooted in the principle that we are producers of knowledge, the session guided students in attuning to their sonic environment, considering the political, historical, and relational dimensions of sound. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and hands-on recording exercises, students explored how sound shapes the cosmology of their films—how ambient noise, interruptions, and consent interact within a sonic field. Engaging in embodied sound mapping, they examined what it means to “take” a recording and how human and non-human actors contribute to a film’s auditory landscape. This practice provided tools for crafting rich, site-specific soundscapes while fostering an ethical awareness of the interdependent worlds that hold and generate sound.
Stillicidum: die Tränen des Steines
Facilitated by HYENAZ with the support of Donato Laborante and friends, this workshop explores animacy, consent, deep listening, and authentic movement in relationship with stone. Held in 2023 at two significant geological sites in Italy—the Grotta di San Guglielmo near Pulo di Altamura in the Alta Murgia region and La Mefite di Rocca San Felice, a sulfur lake historically associated with the goddess Mefitis—the workshop engaged participants in a sonic and physical dialogue with the material world. Through deep listening practices, movement, and sensory mapping, participants explored how bodies resonate with stone, considering the ethics of engaging with non-human entities. By attuning to the vibrational frequencies of rock, air, and water, Stillicidum invited a reimagining of time, place, and the animate potential of seemingly inert matter.
Contextual Mapping and Consensual Field Recording
A workshop in deep listening and sonic ethics, this practice invites participants to engage in contextual sound mapping while questioning the ethics of recording—both human and non-human actors. Held at Kampnagel Hamburg as part of HYENAZ’s research on extraction and in Istanbul with Tanja Ostojić’s Misplaced Women? project, the workshop guides participants through a structured sound walk, using the Deep Listening and Mapping Methodology developed in process with HYENAZ. Through sensory grounding, ambient listening, and found-instrument experimentation, participants map their sonic environment and narrate its histories, politics, and emotional resonances. At its core, this practice asks: What does it mean to take sound? What are the ethical implications of recording? How can we acknowledge consent—both from human subjects and the living world itself? By weaving together movement, mapping, and critical reflection, this workshop expands our awareness of sound as a site of knowledge production, extraction, and reciprocity.
Art and Extractivism: Discussions and Close Reading Group
Art and Extractivism is a collective reading and discussion series led by HYENAZ, designed as a space for artists, workers, and non-academics to engage critically with texts on extractivism without the pressures of academic hierarchies. Rather than reading in isolation, participants read together in real time, resisting the cultural colonization of Western academia and the codified distinctions between academic and artistic knowledge. The series explores how extractive dynamics—whether environmental, intellectual, or physical—manifest in the performing and sonic arts, questioning how creative labor, ideas, and cultural content are mined, commodified, and exploited. By fostering collaborative inquiry and reciprocal dialogue, Art and Extractivism challenges the extractivist tendencies within theory itself, creating an accessible space for those who wish to integrate critical discourse into their practice without it becoming another form of unpaid labor. Sessions have taken place across Europe, including at Kampnagel (Hamburg), Hopscotch Reading Room (Berlin), Casa Tranzit (Cluj), Atelierele Malmaison (Bucharest), Synth Library (Prague), and the Kombinatas Left Festival (Lithuania).
PROXIMATE MOVEMENTS: a somatic workshop by HYENAZ
First developed by HYENAZ as part of Isabelle Lewis’s immersive spaces exploration at Martin Gropius Bau during the Welt Ohne Außen festival, Proximate Movements is a performative installation and praxis exploring how proximity alters perception, emotion, and bodily experience. Participants are guided through movement exercises that examine the shifting dynamics of closeness—how touch, near-touch, and distance shape our emotional landscapes and register within the somatic body. By tuning into these subtle shifts, the workshop invites participants to explore how spatial relationships influence connection, intimacy, and power. This movement research later evolved through performances at Garbicz Festival Poland, where HYENAZ worked alongside Ambrita Sunshine, Federica Dauri, TRAUKO, Bishop Black, and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, before becoming the foundation for CLUSTERFUCK—a movement collective directed and performed by HYENAZ in Peaches’ stage show There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle. By engaging with the body as a site of negotiation, Proximate Movements focuses on the boundary between individual and collective experience, questioning how our perceptions of self and other shift through physical and emotional proximity.
What Does the Body Know: Performance as Practice, Practice as Performance
Facilitated by Mad Kate, this workshop is designed to help performers—beginners and experienced alike—build a stage performance using only what they already know and have. Rooted in the idea that everything needed for performance exists within and around us, participants are guided to generate work from the immediacy of the present moment rather than mining deep histories or extracting from their bodies. Through movement, voice, and physical experimentation, the workshop provides tools to craft intuitive, responsive performances that emerge from the now. It has been held in various locations, including Forte Prenestino in Rome, a historic and radical squat deeply connected to the queer movement, and BetOnest in Germany, an artist residency focused on interdisciplinary practice.
Further Documentation from BetOnest August 2017
(Re)imagining Homes Ecologies and Labours of Love with Tereza Silon and Mad Kate
A four-part workshop facilitated by Tereza Silon and Mad Kate, this workshop creates a facilitated space for physical, somatic, experiential, performative, psychic, emotional, and intellectual exploration. Participants engage with the sentience of human and non-human bodies, the interplay of love and rage, privilege and care, and the rituals of living, dying, grieving, and intimacy. First conducted in 2018 at Ponderosa Dance and Discovery, the workshop fostered a regenerative system of relating within natural and social ecosystems, encouraging participants to map interconnections and explore the vital poly-erotics of care. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was adapted as H.E.L.L. (Homes, Ecologies, and Labours of Love), exploring how somatic and holistic work could be translated into an online format, maintaining embodied connection despite physical distance.
Techniques for Auditory Resistance with HYENAZ
Facilitated by HYENAZ, Techniques for Auditory Resistance is a sound design and field recording workshop that invites participants to engage deeply with their environments—urban or natural—through the act of listening, recording, and responding. Using accessible tools like smartphones, participants create sound artworks that challenge the boundaries between human and non-human voices, exploring sound as both a medium of empowerment and a site of ethical reflection. The workshop has been conducted in diverse locations, from the industrial spaces of Kampnagel Hamburg (2022) to the remote landscapes of Valchiusella, Italy during the CLASTIC – European Performing Arts Residency (2018), as well as at BetOnest in Germany (2017), in Armenia (2017), and in Kyiv, Ukraine (2015). At its core, the workshop asks: What communities emerge when we listen together?—encouraging participants to navigate the politics of consent, extraction, and sonic interconnection in an era of ecological and social urgency.
May I Cross This Line? with Ambra Stucci
Facilitated by Mad Kate with Ambra Stucchi at Xplore Berlin in 2018, this workshop explored the shifting and porous nature of bodily borders as both a sensual and political metaphor. Participants were invited to reimagine the edges of their bodies—not as fixed at the skin, but as fluid and continuously renegotiated, moving between individual and collective experience. Through guided meditation, live soundscapes generated with contact microphones, and erotic play, the group experimented with sinking and merging, playfully dissolving distinctions between self and other. This workshop is part of Mad Kate’s ongoing research and special interest in the intersection of sexuality, border politics, and the politics of sound—challenging the idea that erotic experience exists in an apolitical vacuum. By engaging with intimacy as a site of transformation, May I Cross This Line? contributed to an evolving inquiry into how the movement of bodies, land, and sound informs our understanding of connection, resistance, and desire.
Critical Magic Probability Praxis Series with HYENAZ
A ritual-performance series by HYENAZ, the Critical Magic Probability Praxis series was a practice in which HYENAZ conducted 28 immersive group rituals. More than a performance, these were facilitated experiences where participants came together—often first eating together, putting on makeup together—before creating a circle, stating intentions, releasing them, and collectively closing the ritual. Rather than positioning themselves solely as performers, HYENAZ invited interlocutors to take part—people who acted as bridges between the facilitators and the audience, guiding the community into deeper participation. This structure dissolved the boundary between artist and audience, transforming the experience into a shared ritual practice rather than a passive spectacle.
A central aspect of Critical Magic was conceptual mapping—asking, Where are we? and interrogating the political and social contexts that shape a site. These rituals were groundbreaking in bringing explicitly magical praxis into nightclubs, reinforcing what club communities have long known: the club is already a ritual space, and to dance is already a ritual. By bridging the art world’s engagement with ritual and the nightclub’s embodied, often unspoken practice of communal transformation, Critical Magic redefined what it means to create and participate in collective experience.
