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.
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
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 does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
Three panels offering opportunities to discuss how to build stronger alliances between the sex workers’ rights, migrants rights and reproductive justice movements and how to face, together, an increasingly punitive and reactionary system.
Quartet improvisation by Klaus Filip – laptop, Radu Malfatti – trombone, Sean Meehan – snare & cymbals, Taku Unami – rice and dish.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
Work for cello, percussion, contra bassoon and cherbulum commissioned for Instal in collaboration with Paragon
A programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
“Mackey composes realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.” — New York Times. “Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism have reinvented modernism for our time.”— LitHub
