collective intimacies and epigenetic memories

In this episode Romina Achatz is in conversation with Sylvain
Souklaye, a Brooklyn-based French multimodal artist who is
working at the intersection of live performance, sound art,
performative installation and social research. He is
interested in sampling intimacies about people who don't belong
to a determinate identity, gender, class, colour or nationality.


After a short introduction the episode starts with 2 poems. After
the poetry Sylvain talks about his life and career paths. The
conversation deals with the questions: What is intimacy for you?
What is your definition of Epigenetic?


Further Information: www.sylvainsouklaye.com/


Manifesto: "Sylvain Souklaye explores collective intimacies and
epigenetic memories as a living language and the body as the last
remaining proof. He questions the “Safe Space” while history
always has been a minefield for his ancestors. Are minds, souls
and bodies broken by generations able to accept peace? To process
healing? Or are pain and warfare the only way because nothing and
nowhere is safe?
Sylvain Souklaye body of work is a continuous and brutal flow of
freedom and rage, anger and pain, past and future embodied into a
collective moment. His body language gives a natural rhythm to a
mother tongue of an odd but primal togetherness.
It becomes one movement in which the audience swims or
sinks.
It becomes an epiphany and an external exchange between Souklaye
and the audience. With Sylvain Souklaye’s practice, passive
or voyeuristic people have to take a stand because History will
not be kind with “Safe spacers”. For him, the audience must be
accountable.


But what about Now and Then? They are the continuation of
denunciation and a reconciliation process.
With the NOW Sylvain Souklaye documents the casual and
disconnected barbary as endless storage information becomes the
most efficient form of amnesia. With the THEN he
investigates, warns, theorises our automated civilization and the
extinction of empathy.
Sylvain Souklaye offers his mind, soul, body and the unsettling
space with the audience and makes them the new carrier of his
epigenetic history. It is not a social, gender or skin colour
epigenetic."