An epigenetic body mapping…
It is not a safe space. We are not safe. I’m not safe.
This is not a performance. This is my life, maybe yours.
It is not a safe space. We are not safe. I’m not safe.
This is my first memory of my first police contact, it may also be yours.
After church, I was running back home, I was just a child.
It is not a safe space. We are not safe. I’m not safe.
I was just there. I was me. I was breathing. I was alive.
It is not a safe space. We are not safe. I’m not safe.
For them, I was not a minor, I was an error.
It is not a safe space. We are not safe. I’m not safe.
I relive it every time I cross the path of an officer.
Breathe for the forgotten.
Breathe for you.
Breathe for those who can’t.
Breathe for us.
And do not stop.
“This is our space. This is our time. This is our fight.
For all the bodies, minds and souls that don’t follow the right corpus.”
Sylvain Souklaye explores collective intimacies and epigenetic memories as a living language and the body as the last remaining proof.
Sylvain Souklaye 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
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.
Sylvain Souklaye’s body of work is epigenetic of the intimate.
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