Sex Workers’ Festival of Resistance NYC
For this day-long festival, sex workers and their allies from New York, the tri-state area, and Europe will gather at MoMA PS1 to debate, perform, dance, strategize & share knowledge.
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.
For this day-long festival, sex workers and their allies from New York, the tri-state area, and Europe will gather at MoMA PS1 to debate, perform, dance, strategize & share knowledge.
An invitation into languages field of touch; to speak in feeling together.
How do communities practice being one another’s means, addressing their material problems facing them replicating the state’s violent logic of who is disposable.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
A programme of discontinuity between narration, text and image. Including Manual Saiz’s employment of John Malkovich’s Spanish dubbing double and Peter Rose’s absurdly hilarious concrete poetry subtitling chaos.
An excavation of the 1805 Lock Hospital in Glasgow. Its official function was to support ‘unfortunate females with venereal disease’, but really what happened was that women and girls were marched in, experimented on, and often never released.
A sort of prayer and conference, a sort of scream and dialogue – a monologue and declaration at the time, addressing how we can build complicity with one another.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
The Experimental Improvisers Association of Japan, [EXIAS-J] are a loose collective of musicians and dilettantes who seem to represent an entire and self sufficient scene in one band.
Jarrod Fowler and Christof Migone kick things off with performances involving edible plants, a saw, dandruff, and Christof responding to the prompt: “as far as you can for as long as you can.”
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
Summing up of the investigations with a reflection on what has been done that week and what could be done the next.