Contextual Statement

PROXIMITY explores how bodies negotiate and transform in relation to their distance through  improvisational movement and the engagement of performance as a site of praxis. It investigates how proximity can influence grievability, acting or failing to act as a politically and emotionally binding force of care, and it explores the power of skin contact.

PROXIMITY was composed from field recordings of frogs discovered while camping on Yorta Yorta Land in Australia. We were invited there by Dr. Wayne Atkinson who is an elder of the Yorta Yorta-Dja Dja Wurrung Indigenous Nations of the Murray-Goulburn and Central Victoria region, Australia.

Music, Concept, Design, Styling and Editing: HYENAZ
Choreography: Mad Kate
Cinematography: Jo Pollux and Raja de Luna
Movers: Danilo Andrés, Tereza Silon, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Bishop Black, ROC, XIL
Audio Mastering: Becki Whitton

Thanks to Rainer and Ray and the folks at our Berlin label SPRINGSTOFF.

Text from PROXIMITY:  do you recognize me my your sovereignty / I am not close to you / I am not there / it is not me / I make better contact with your ghost / how much of my body could I lose / does our proximity bind us / I am afraid to touch / I might get a sense of you if you were within / reach / the further away you are the easier it is to ignore you / are we close / even though we touch / I you can’t hear my your voice / proximity

HYENAZ are producer-performers Mad Kate and XIL. Passionate about electronic music and performance as a tool of socio-political transformation, they compose primarily from field recordings that are shape-shifted into digital synthesizers and aural landscapes for their live somatic performance practice. HYENAZ are currently touring their second album CRITICAL MAGIC 비평적 마술 (SPRINGSTOFF), a techno ritual based in contact, sound, and movement to break physical and mental isolation and to spark discourse that is both critical and utopian.

PROXIMITY is the first single from their third album, Foreign Bodies. The album originated through the action of learning from individuals and communities who move in resistance to and as a result of the management and control of bodies by states and other authoritarian actors. Each of the audio works released as part of Foreign Bodies has an associative mixed reality performance and audio visual installation that interacts with the conceptual origins of the auditory process.