Dreams are Colder than Death
Arthur Jafa
A landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.
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 landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.
Underlying radical transfeminism, as an urgent critique of binary essentialism and fixed identities, is the call for a new kind of thinking that can move between and integrate the truths of all lives in their transformations.
Leading language/ action/ sound poet performed his groundbreaking concrete poem, a dizzying mandala of text, symbols and rubber stamps; a kind of book as reading machine.
What does it mean to resist seeking assimilation or inclusion within, or let our demands be co-opted by the very systems we seek to dismantle?
“Hidden in the hands an alluvial transcription of reach and embrace. The final flickers of the body’s expression, caress and touch.” – boychild
Multiple images, glimpses of old films, abstract images in the midst of an electro-acoustic sound field of tape loops & analogue synthesizers
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
A confrontational and somehow shamanic stance; introspective silences shattered by savage jabs at the strings, whirlwind strums dying into spartan chords
Listening to people listening to their own homes. Musicians and actors will listen back to recordings made in local peoples homes on headphones, and interpret/ translate what they are hearing.
An audio/ video, lecture/ performance exploring the queer and companionly inter-activity of human-animal relations.
Reveling in the geometric, mathematical and perceptual relationship between sound and form, this programme features a landmark work of experimental film in Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer; a complex, enduring and expressive of structuralist or flicker films.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James