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20-21.08.2024 / PEACHES at OFF DAYS FESTIVAL Berlin / Hamburg

20 August 2024 PEACHES BERLIN

Off Days

21 August 2024 PEACHES Hamburg

Off Days: Róisín Murphy & Peaches
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Performances and Exhibits

RECENT PAST NEWNESS

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HYENAZ Art & Extractivism Reading Group

NEXT SESSIONS

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

https://www.facebook.com/events/534875094963552/534875101630218/

You can also join the event on Discord: https://discord.gg/vTHMdtRUdJ

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

Past Sessions

Recordings of Past Sessions

ongoing Berlin, Germany: Hopscotch Reading Room Auxiliary Space Wedding
20 + 27.06.2022 Hamburg, Germany: Kampnagel KX Studio
26.09.2021 Cluj, Romania: CASA TRANZIT
24.09.2021 Bucharest, Romania: ATELIERELE MALMAISON
15.09.2021 Prague, Czechia: Synth Library Prague: Various Artists – Art and Extractivism, Prague, CZ
14.08.2021 Lithuania: Kombinatas Left Festival

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HYENAZ | Extraction

Research funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste

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.

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HYENAZ | Signals

https://vimeo.com/567545786

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.

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HYENAZ | Ex-Situ

AUDIO VISUAL WORK AND SONIC SCULPTURE

LISTENhttps://ditto.fm/ex-situ_149d429fdf
WATCHYoutube / Vimeo
BUYBandcamp

Concept

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.

Team

TEXT + VOCALSYusuph Suso
SCULPTURE DESIGNLau Bau
COMPOSITIONHyenaz
VIDEOYusuph Suso
VIDEO EDITHyenaz
CREATIVE CODERodrigo Frenk

Supported by

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This Morning Waking (2000 – 2020)

EP and Essay Collection

Purchase the EP: Mad Kate | the Tide – This Morning Waking HERE

This Morning Waking. This morning waking, I will wake up, I will wake up, I will wake up, and it will be the clearest morning I have ever woken.

I have been repeating this mantra for 20 years. I have been repeating, and failing, and trying again, and waking up and waking more and waking better. I have been failing to be awake. I have been oppressing and being oppressed and perpetuating my oppression and perpetuating the oppression of others. I have been waking to the oppression and to the perpetuation of oppression and I am still waking and waking and waking again. And the mornings are never entirely clear but perhaps clearer than before, perhaps a series of “minor gestures” (a beautiful term coined by Erin Manning) of waking up.

And yet, though I wake and am waking, I understand that what it means for me to wake up is not what everyone would agree is waking up at all. I may, to others, still be sleeping. And whatever waking I am doing, whether one calls it waking or not, that waking creates wakes—wakes which may, but may not, feel at all good to others.

To this I can only say I am waking in the way that makes sense to me and is done with the intention of gathering knowledges for myself, which I can only hope will help me to begin to be a braver advocate, a better friend, a more compassionate stranger. I can only hope that my own personal changes may be an inspiration or an example, or a calling to others. I can’t tell someone else how to wake up—not tomorrow, anyway. Waking is a lifetime of mornings in which we begin by opening our eyes.

I have returned time and time again to the theme of rape in my work, to the theme of consenting or not consenting to sex, to the theme of how one assesses one’s own choice in the matter of their body and how that choice is adulterated by the paradigm within which one lives, one understands one’s self, the way in which the person is shaped by the pursuit of their own personal achievements of empowerment, their processes of waking.

In “This Morning Waking” I return to texts I wrote as I was first interrogating such issues: the naming and identification of an instance or instances of rape; the naming and identification of instances of non-consensual sexual encounters; the sensations of dis-empowerment; the embodied experiences of violation that I first experienced between ages 17 and 20. I return once again to writings and first “selfies” (though at the time I called them self-portraits) that I initiated as a young woman when I was trying to contextualize and understand what was happening to me as my body was being sexualized by others and by myself.

I return to the person that I was when I was first “coming out” as queer (though I understood it then as bisexual), as polyamorous (although I understood it then as non-monogamous); when I first was coming out as sex positive (which was then far more theoretical than physically manifested) and when I was first showing interest in experimenting with my body in the context of sex work. My desire was to challenge the internal writer writing about sex work and the internal academic theorizing about sex work, hoping to challenge those writers and academics outside myself as well. I knew then that I wanted a physical experience on stage, at work, and in the bedroom that would help me to “wake up”–wake up to understanding my own body through the body, to access knowledges located in the body and to see her/them in the larger context of what it means to be this body in the world—this particular body born with cunt that would grow breasts.

The music for This Morning Waking has been written together with Jacopo Bertacco aka “The Tide” in the form of our collaboration Mad Kate | the Tide. Sara Neidorf plays drums on When Did We Get Ill?.

I did not know exactly in what way I wanted to pursue waking up. I felt shy about using words and who would hear me. My writings were personally revolutionary—huge steps of waking up. But returning to them now I wish I could have given myself more strength and courage to speak louder and more often. So I try to do that louder and more clearly, now.

It has been 25 years since my first sexual experiences and even more years of writing, processing and performing about how I feel as a sexual and sexualized body. And I am still waking, still in process, still becoming a sexual body, a sexually powerful body. As body and a/sexuality are intertwined, I might better say: I am still in process of becoming a body. I believe that I have come very far (or rather, if I were to subvert that linear paradigm of progress and improvement, I would say simply that I have journeyed for a very long time). And now I am here, a here which is both similar and different to where I was—to where we were, collectively—before. And perhaps I feel “more clear” than I remember feeling.

I return because part of the clarity, or the process of waking and clarifying, is a revolution, an endless revolving and returning to the first mornings of waking. Those first mornings were spent in confusion, in depression, in anger. What I might call these first mornings always call me back. They remind me of why and how deeply important sex is, and they also newly inform me and teach me that I was not alone at that time nor am I alone now.

They also remind me that I was living (and continue to live)—inside of a culture decorated by the iconography of rape and built by the “actual” perpetrators of rape, some of whom, since #metoo and #timesup, have been named and silenced. These accusations and adjudications have shown us (again, and not for the first time) that “our heroes” were in fact perpetuating “actual” rape during my most formative years (actual is in quotes since I am still skeptical to form a binary between rape and not-rape, between rapists and not-rapists).

I am both surprised and not surprised to find out who those people are, though it certainly has a way of being darkly validating. Funny – somehow – that I could perceive the micro-waves of their misogyny reverberate through the art they were producing, though I couldn’t quite place my finger on why or how or what any one particular person was actually doing. I could then, and can now, only speak of my own body, and perhaps a bit on behalf of those encounters experienced by close friends. But I struggled then, as I struggle now, to make direct links between the culture of rape, the iconography of rape, and how that culture and iconography makes its way into real, felt, physically manifested experiences of rape and misogyny which shape almost every day of all of our lives. And yes I mean ALL of our lives.

#metoo and #timesup has brought some of us to waking up about who and what particular perpetrators were doing. But of course my own #metoo movement started around 2000, when, though I wasn’t able to bring anyone to justice, I was beginning to find means of how I would name, contextualize, theorize and wake up to what I was feeling. And more importantly, how I would overcome those feelings of being silenced, shamed, violated. It may be worth stating, and a topic for much larger discussion, that I don’t believe that “criminal justice” would have been the right solution for most of the perpetrators of gender based violence(s) against me, nor healed me as a result. I would discover personal healing, however, as a writer, as a performer, as a sex worker, as a touch practitioner. This is the work I have been doing my whole career. Not just waking up to any one particular instance of misogyny or rape or perpetuation of violence but to an entire structure that consents to this (myself included) and figuring out how to process and transform this in artwork and workart.

This essay waking 9 September 2019, waking 11 September 2019, waking 11 December 2019. Berlin.