- 26 Sept 2021 9pm UTC
- dur 5min
Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is a performance exploring the tension between desire and preservation. The nonverbal performance expresses my desire to connect with other bodies outside and the inner necessity of self-preservation, after fifteen months inside my home, within myself. Locked in a red room, I fight an invisible extime frontier while nourishing my inner realm. What could happen when what I missed becomes too much? All those shadows, bodies, faces and voices are as close as I fantasized about them. Yet, the reality, and its endless and noisy factory of movements, crush my dream of a simple exchange with someone. Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is a delicate and brutal ritual where movement and breathing oscillate between an unbalanced body and a centred intimacy. During the performance, I use the air and oxygen to be inside and outside simultaneously. I stumble, searching for gravity and imaginary people. Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is an attempt to be present and absent until a new form of collective intimacy emerges from my fingertips and my eyes to others\’ skin and eyes. Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is the act of a concrete body trying to reach a forgotten and hypocritical universe. Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is a no man\’s land populated with future/ex strangers. Dark matter, Red lines, and Stendhal imprint is an inner spiritual war.
BIO: Sylvain Souklaye is a Brooklyn based French multi-modal 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