Public Intimacy is a motion- and site-specific sonic experience that reimagines the relationship between sound, space, and human presence through spatial audio techniques. By capturing and manipulating live environmental sounds, bodily movements, and architectural acoustics, the project examines how sonic hierarchies dictate spatial and social interactions based on the politics of noise, making questions of who is heard or silenced tangible. Through improvisation and real-time sound processing, Public Intimacy transforms public spaces into sites of collective intimacy, where deep listening becomes an act of resistance and reconnection.
📅 DATE & TIME: Thursday, January 15, 2026 ⏰ 7 PM
📍 LOCATION: Harvestworks, 596 Broadway, Suite 602, New York, NY 10012
At its core, Public Intimacy is both a system and a philosophy—an evolving performance framework that investigates the power dynamics within the “politics of noise.” The piece examines how sonic hierarchies dictate spatial and social interactions by capturing and manipulating live environmental sounds, bodily movements, and architectural acoustics. Who is heard? Who is silenced? How do different bodies claim or resist space through sound? Public Intimacy makes these questions tangible through improvisation and real-time sound processing, constructing an immersive and hyper-localized auditory world. Binaural recording techniques heighten this experience, amplifying the nuances of human interaction and the spatial resonance of the site.
Rather than adhering to a fixed composition, Public Intimacy adapts dynamically to its surroundings. Participants become active agents in shaping the soundscape, blurring the boundaries between performer and audience. Each whisper, breath, and movement contributes to a fluid interplay of sonic textures, fostering a deep sense of shared vulnerability and sensory dialogue. In this way, the project transforms public spaces into sites of collective intimacy, where architecture ceases to be a static backdrop. Instead, it becomes a living, breathing entity that reveals the often-unnoticed tensions of sonic power.
Public Intimacy explores the role of improvisation, binaural sound, and spatial engagement in crafting new modes of auditory and performative experience. By addressing the politics of noise, the project invites audiences to reconsider how power operates through sound, questioning whose voices shape our environments and how deep listening can become an act of resistance and reconnection.
ABOUT SYLVAIN SOUKLAYE:
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker and author. His craft and mission go beyond and deeper than the question of identity. Following the idea of the rhizome, Souklaye digs in the sensitivity and history laying in the interiority of broken bodies, environmental urgencies and political retribution.
Souklaye started his artistic journey focusing on DIY social justice, or vandalism as he called it, and defined it as the necessary destruction for justice and self-designation. Lyon, his hometown, carries the Canut revolts heritage and merges with his Neg marron origin from Martinique (freedom and rebellion movement), to obtain a perfect cocktail, a cocktail molotov.
Souklaye then began to write action poetry and interwove it with protean political and visual happenings —sometimes extreme, often borderline, his messages traveled from guts to guts across all corners of France, Switzerland and Belgium. But it is during his durational live radio show at the renowned French independent radio station RCT that he started to craft what would become his uniquely lyrical and gut-wrenching live experiences.
This inner quest took other forms with his writings — le jour du fleau which explores the duality of the night and Solus which cuts deep into grief — and his obsession with noise and its sonic linguistics. The noise from and inside the city shaped his approach to granular synthesis. Those raw words and intense sounds created the condition for his live experiences and installations.
Interiority is at the center of Souklaye’s body of work; collective intimacy and epigenetic dialogues are the inner spaces where he spends time exploring and inviting the audience (in)to. Each living soul is a part of his live experiences, and there are no active or passive members of the audience, only those who want to be activated. His shows are self-centered yet collective live experiences that reveal what is left inside him and us.