DEMAPPING by Sylvain Souklaye

DEMAPPING is a series of audio experiences about space, time, and our intimate and collective relationship to territories' cultural and material definitions.
The practice forced me to rethink from within in silence. Then, I could collect a new form of chaos while reading, searching checkpoints, losing track, and finding walks inside unknown cities. I add granularity and modularity to the history and interiority of the spaces by being present and active inside the sonic landscape. Those audio experiences are a departure from field recordings' beliefs about the invisible and impalpable nature of the recordist.
With DEMAPPING, I choose not to colonize a time without giving a part of me, assuming my responsibility.
My presence has a sonic, bodily, and ecological impact on living beings and the unanimated objects/structures.
I'm not a witness but a factor enabling a transmuting narrative inside architectural history and political eugenism designed by men on humanity.

DEMAPPING is my engagement to establish public live experience as a necessity inside the world of secret recordings. Recording can't just be heard anymore; they have to have a voice, thoughts, and take positions. Nature and people are not invisible and impalpable. There is no space or time for passivity.
DEMAPPING is trying to reclaim and transform spaces and times of territory.
It is a collective journey to de-archive audio dogma and act on and for our environment when it is still possible.

I'm not a recorder. I'm a microphone.

North Brussels (MUSEUM, MC DONALD'S AND MIGRANTS) is a live art recording about the desire and fear of repopulating a space after a month of captivity while considering that our momentary isolation is nothing compared to a permanent exile.
Walking through an abandoned museum above an overplayed McDonald's, I was just another dot wandering inside a central station full of migrants trying to reach the UK by train. The silent but palpable tension was aggravated by police officers chasing them; what are the space and time to reintroduce the human factor inside a dead architecture?

South Williamsburg (INSIDE NO MASK LAND) is a live art recording about the visual and inner conflict between reason and faith while NYC was still shaking each time the ambulance sirens were screaming during the autumn of 2020.
Walking through space and time where people didn't have any masks was an exalting and traumatic experience because all those voices without protective filters were as natural and warm as they were a collective and passive attempt at murder.

Sylvain Souklaye is a multimodal artist 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.

sylvainsouklaye.com