Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
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 almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
A performance, a radio show, an installation, an endurance test. A game of chance. Constantly broadcasting live, actor Tam Dean Burn will leave Tramway at the start of INSTAL and walk away from it, in an ever increasing spiral, for a day. Then he’ll walk back.
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.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
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?
A slowed down single tracking shot along a corridor as workers at the Bath Iron Works, (Maine, USA) take their lunch break.
Four intimate 45 minute sessions, readings of your political questions – using Tarot, Palmistry, Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy, and the invented methods of Fake and Political Therapy.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Hartmut led “a workshop in the old-fashioned way of discussion, mutual exploration of ideas and samples; trying out what can be shared and where the fault lines show.”
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
Hijokaidan rapidly built a following due to the overwhelmingly physical intensity of their live performances, often involving destructive onstage rituals of vomit, urine, mangled guitars and ear shredding volume.