Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
A kind of performed installation of searing noise and silence, where we’re not sure who the performer is, when it starts or ends or even who it’s for.
An improvisation that may or may not involve (typical) improvisation.
Can a musician create a sonic photograph; something with a depth of field, where you can hear sounds and their interconnections, much as you see objects and their relationships in a photo? Could a filmmaker use musical concepts to represent landscape?
Radical transfeminism aims to hold the space for finding relations between the ruins of the everyday. Emerging from the debris, spaces for politics find form as poetics to carry understandings, actions and be/longings.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
Terry is one of the most entertaining and unpredictable musicians in the London free improvising music scene. Rhodri Davies extends his instrument under a battery of techniques creating sound colours and textures quite alien to the harp.
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
Ian and Gil will host a discussion on the Argument project’s social and political commentaries, and with you try and maybe think through whether and how they might still have some currency today: what’s changed and what’s stayed the same?