Sylvain Souklaye (Paris France / Copenhagen Denmark): RM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE

ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE acts as a sensitive and intense interaction between two strangers connecting physically and symbolically with one another. With ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE performer artist Sylvain Souklaye questions how our endless and unlimited digital self can cope inside a huis-clos for two and without appended smartphones to deflect the moment. ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE’s attempt is to set a familiar environment leading the performer and a visitor to acknowledge the most primal need for humanity: I see you, you exist, therefore “I” exist. ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE is an experimentation involving hands, eyes, and souls. It aims to extract the performer and a visitor from the rest of the data stream during an unconventional handover. ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE tests the limits of subtle physical interactions in a small hidden space while the most intimate parts of our life are becoming open source and exhibited. Are we so disconnected that we are unable to wrestle with the idea of opening our personal space to a stranger for a brief moment? With ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE performer artist Sylvain Souklaye sets the table… two chairs, cellular souls and sights.

Sylvain Souklaye is a French performance and installation 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