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?
Taking over the gallery spaces at Dundee Contemporary Arts, the first Kill Your Timid Notion presented a 3 day programme of live immersive experiences and specially curated film programmes.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
Lo-fidelity sheets of parinirvanic mangled tone get driven into oblivion by two longstanding gurus of the Northern England primitivist noise.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Black-clad with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jams.
Copying without Copying is 3 evenings of events that are about what happens when we speak, or when we hear someone speak on our behalf, when we share a collective moment of hearing and maybe understanding.
Is it possible to dance our way out of the hardened stances and identity prisons we are locked in?
A collaboration bringing together artists with a shared gravitational heft to their work; an intense and concentrated accumulation of detail and power.
Autobiographical detail becomes a lens to reflect and refract the deepest aspects of personal and social life in Delany’s ground-breaking non-fiction writing.