SOLFEGE SOUCHE, 2018, single-channel video, sound composition and arrangement.

February 2019, Palazzo Michiel, Strada Nova, 4391, 30121 Campo Santi Apostoli, Venezia, Italy

June 2019, CICA Museum,Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA), Gyeonggi-do, South Korea

October 2020, “The Performer”, LoosenArt, Millipiani, Rome, Italy

“I love the way the figure is emerges then blends back into its surroundings, it is how I feel in the wild parts of Skye as if I am the landscape. The light is beautiful. It isn’t like Bill Viola’s work, but it has the same emotional effect on me.” -Joan Foye, UK

A Solfège Souche is by definition the root of a forgotten connection with nature.

In our time of rapidly increasing use of technology in everyday life, we face incessant streams of new questions mirroring the ethical and moral lines. This space framed in the video asks the body questions of identity and presence: Is it dangerous if we do not know what we stand to lose? The body itself dances with the nature, merging and emerging from shadows and light. The body becomes a form for drawing lines, through movements. Binaural beats compose the soundtrack, reminiscent of tinnitus or ear trauma. The pitches register as psychological markers of physical events.

In an effort to portray a dynamic relationship with nature, instead of a dominance over nature, the Butoh-dance inspired movements recreate the way lifeforms which are cut down in the forest continually find a way to reach towards light. The Solfège Souche video performance is the foundation in the development of an affordance technology research project.

Solfège refers to a music education method developed to teach sight-singing and pitch accuracy. Originating in 11th century, music theorist Guido of Arezzo assigned six syllables (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) recognized now as the major scale.

Ut queant laxīs resonāre fībrīs; Mīra gestōrum famulī tuōrum; Solve pollūtī labiī reātum, Sancte Iōhannēs.

Much later, the “ut” was changed to the open syllable “do”, “sol” sometimes to “so”, while “si” (later changed to “ti”) was added for the seventh scale-note, giving rise to the modern solfège. Souche is stump (of a tree), and in Latin means root while simultaneously referring to genealogy. Souche was also a name of an unknown virus claiming the lives of at least twenty people  (une souche virale inédite a fait au minimum vingt morts).

Affordance is what the environment offers the individual, and refers to all action possibilities depending on users’ physical capabilities. For example, a chair not only “affords” being “sat on,” but also “thrown,” “stood on,” and so on. James J. Gibson, coined the term “affordance.”