HYENAZ AUTOMINE
PERFORMANCE
DECEMBER 9 – 10 2021
ACUD Berlin
HYENAZ present their musical works as immersive performance intervention. A performance asks that bodies are present: as performer, as audience, as active interlocutor. The assembling of bodies together for the purpose of performance – and the proximity of those bodies to experience or create together – is in itself a practice of (re)discovery of the politics of sharing physical space and the immanent territory of the flesh.
AUTOMINE brings together performative and audio-visual work that has been developed through Foreign Bodies, a 7-year long research project that explores relationships of bodies in motion, bodies in relation, and bodies in resistance. Through the visceral and explicit body, HYENAZ interrogate mechanisms that treat the body as a foreign object—a thing to be managed and controlled, an unknown territory even to itself, an “other” to be feared or annihilated.
Central to this project is the idea that the body is disappearing: from social interactions blasted into the corporate cloud, to machine intelligence tangled in the systems that govern life, to techno-futurists fantasies of an age where analogue flesh has vanished into digital consciousness. At this uncanny juncture, where surfaces look familiar but everything is shifting, HYENAZ claw to the presence of the body and the knowledge contained therein.
AUTOMINE pushes Foreign Bodies deeper into questions around a/Arts and extractivism, where “extraction” is utilized as metasignifier for the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies; the mining of minerals, gas and water from the ground; the taking and recording of sounds, words and images from sentient beings; the seemingly consensual extraction of digital content, and the “mining of the exotic” from our very identities.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
AUTOMINE is an immersive music and dance performance; with sung and spoken texts in English language. It lasts about 55 minutes. As the performance space is considered a practice of being together, every person in the room is invited as active participant, without any requirements to move or not move. The performance presents the explicit and naked queer body and deals with themes such as militarized violence, rape, and the sexual(ized) body. The music can be very loud and some of the visuals use strobing effects. The theater is wheelchair accessible by elevator.
BIOGRAPHY
HYENAZ are Berlin-based sound and movement artists Kathryn Fischer aka Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher. The immersive performances, dance tracks, soundscapes, performative installations and a/v works they produce utilize the sonic shape-shifting of field recordings gathered in the process of site-specific works.
HYENAZ are in a continued research phase of their 4th work in the Foreign Bodies Series entitled Extraction, with support from Fonds Darstellende Künste. Extraction examines extractivist practices in art, specifically within sonics and field recordings, in order to develop better accountability practices. To these ends they have been conducting a reading and discussion group that meets biweekly. HYENAZ are entering the project phase of Ex-Situ, a collaborative performance structure and sound installation with Yusuph Suso. Ex Situ explores how human beings can exist in past, current, and future homeland(s), simultaneously. It has been awarded a Musikfonds FEB grant.
CREDITS
concept, music and performance HYENAZ
costumes YEORG KRONNAGEL and ARMANDO BERNETH
visuals HYENAZ, DUŠAN PEJČIĆ, YENIA RAMM & OLD ERIK, ROBERT MLECZKO, JO POLLUX AND RAJA DE LUNA
featured performers DANILO ANDRÉS, TEREZA SILON, SIMON(E) JAIKIRIUMA PAETAU, BISHOP BLACK, ROC, XIL, MMAKGOSI KGABI, MARTINI CHERRY FURTER
Development of this production was supported in part through a research grant by Fonds Darstellende Künste #TakeCare.