festival
Sylvain Souklaye
BIO
"French artist Sylvain Souklaye is interested in sampling memorial narratives about resilient human beings living in deprived urban areas extracting themselves out of systemic segregation. His performances are a collage of individual memories which are re-enacted for and via the audience.
Self-taught, Souklaye began performing with happenings as a means of kidnapping his audience during an intimate moment. He later experimented with digital art installations and performance art while pursuing his writer’s path.
Among his best-known pieces are la blackline, a 5-year daily radio performance, le déserteur an installation dwelling on the notion of abandonment, and #TME a docudrama performance exploring self-inflicted amnesia and the resilience of a second generation Algerian immigrant.His methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy. He adds field recording techniques as a narrative layer.”
Stateless Mind #3
Performance Title
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Sylvain Souklaye is interested in sampling intimacies about people who don't belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality.
His performances are a collage of individual memories which are re-enacted for and via the audience.Self-taught, he began performing with vandalism in Lyon, France 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.
Souklaye is part of Future Now 2020 in the top 100 Contemporary Artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize, his work has been exhibited internationally in Espacio Gallery (London), Ancien Musée de Bruxelles-Nord (Belgium), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Ars Electronica Forum Wallis (Switzerland), Helsinki Central Library Oodi (Finland), Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz gallery (Berlin, Germany), Grace Exhibition Space (New York, USA).
Stateless Mind #2
Performance Title - ARM WRESTLING FOR TWO, PLEASE
Stateless Mind #3
Performance Title
Nouveaux Classiques
Video Performance is performed by Sylvain Souklaye and Benjamin Paulin
Filmed and edited by Frédéric Vermeersch
The unspoken video performance Nouveaux Classiques reveals fragile fragments of friendship and decency between the artist Sylvain Souklaye and the singer Benjamin Paulin.
Nouveaux Classiques explores how premeditated words, sequenced dialogue and the certainty of knowledge can become an obstacle when one tries to establish a link between the inner-self and the outside world during an interview.
The artist is supposed to provide a detailed interview and the singer has the opportunity to articulate the grey areas of his album L’Homme Moderne. In the end, neither rhetoric nor punchlines are left or needed to expose an unsettling
intimacy for two.
They know each other... One knows the questions... The other knows the answers... but... But none of that matters when silence is the how, the when and the where.
Stateless Mind #2
Performance Title
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.
Stateless Mind #1
Performance Title
Digital state of mind & physical body of work
Statement
In Digital state of mind & physical body of work, Sylvain Souklaye addresses and explores some of
the outcomes of digital technology and culture when they challenge and merge with art.
There is no definitive answer regarding the influence and coexistence of those entities because the
“digital” is a work-in-progress living organism.
The digital technology and culture are here and it is now. One of the most difficult aspects of the
conversation is to try to not define the "digital" by the moment in which we are. The challenge that
we have to face is to enhance the communication between artists, archivists, thinkers and a
technological "revolution" that thrives through our culture.
The digital technology and culture offer another perspective on the subject of archives. We never
had a point in history where tools and communications gave us access to "infinite" possibilities of
data. The issue is about creating bridges between the academic world and the mainstream audience.
Main topics of discussion:
- Art without digital culture and new digital culture without art.
- The digital "revolution"
- Technology, industry and economy
- Tools and ideology
- User needs, desires and limits
- Common visual language
- Mobile archives
- Multichannel archives
- Conversational archives
- Audience to be the center of the archives
- How archives can build reflex memories for the ‘none-attention-span’ generation
- le déserteur (app) & LOST (chatbots), my experiences
