- 28 Mar 2021 7pm UTC
- dur 12min
* “please use your earbuds/headphones to enter into my imaginary audio dimension.”
Like most people, I spent the year being torn apart by a strange cultural dimension made of over communication and isolation. At the centre of our universal purgatory, the screens are taking more space and time inside our transformative experience. This digital and live-streamed exode is pushing our intimate and collective behaviour to its limits. With Soliloquy in motion, I decided to explore live art without technological mirror or windows. This is the premise and promise of my desire of others and places that are invisible and impalpable. I explore ways to synchronise body language, sonic friction and interrogative voice to offer an unknown imaginary land to the audience. I want to experiment and decide if I prefer performing with an imaginary audience more than in front of an inanimate object. Flat noise is the inaugural audio performance of Soliloquy in motion. Flat noise is a fight between empty space and a sonic parasite. They are both fighting for what remains of my attention. I\’m not a prize. The prize is not who, but where. How will I still believe about the place where I exist? Architecture or pain? I\’m unable to choose, I\’ll try again and again. What primal elements are constituting the reality of an environment? What are the minimal motion and thoughts to incarnate a space? Are friction and declaration the requirements to cherish togetherness? For how long can we remember inside the dimension of absence? Far away from home, baffled by my new environment, it has been almost a year without holding like-minded people, friends and chosen family in my arms. Faces on screens are becoming more and more unreal. My digital addiction might accept the bargain, but my intimacy is missing its favourite target. My body and my mind need a presence, even an untouchable and undesirable one. Flat noise is a date and a trap to forget the absence momentarily. You are invited to colonise this moment and keep it with you on your way out. PS: please use your earbuds/headphones to enter into my imaginary audio dimension.
BIO: Sylvain Souklaye is a New York based French multimodal artist. He is obsessed with sampling intimacies about people who don’t belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality. Sylvain Souklaye performances are a collage of individual memories which are relived for and via the audience. Self-taught, he began performing with vandalism in Lyon, and then intimate happenings, radio experimentation and action poetry. He later developed digital art installations using field recording techniques as a narrative layer while pursuing his writer’s path. Among his best known pieces are la blackline, a 5-year durational radio performance about socio-economic survival and urban absurdity, le déserteur a digital art installation dwelling on the notion of abandonment, TME a docudrama performance exploring self-inflicted amnesia and resilience and MIGRANT MARKET a remake of the slave market updated for the uber economy. Sylvain Souklaye methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy. ARTIST’S WEBSITE