Sylvain Souklaye is a Brooklyn based French-Caribbean 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.
Migrant Market is rebranding performance of the Slave Market.
It challenges the political short thinking / short comings and put them into practice and reality.
The performance tells the stories of immigrant children who are forced to integrate new sociological and religious concepts, with the deletion of their roots and cultures as a starting point.
Migrant Market shows the consequences of denying someone’s identity. It aims at sharing what could be the destiny of former immigrants when they become a political product.
Migrant Market is a public experience about the former happiest country in the world (Denmark) and its relationship to security and liberty.
With Migrant Market, Souklaye tries to demonstrate what could be the final thoughts and acts of our passivity when states behave like predators.
See more of Sylvain Souklaye’s work:
