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.
Work grouped in this theme might deal with bringing something from the past back into a present day context or perhaps the literal and/or obsessive repetition of something many times over. Highlights include the loud and emotional collective reading of Zong!, or the epic public reading of transcripts from one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that took place at U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. It is our intention that the paired ‘terms’ that this theme is comprised of are not synonyms nor are they binary oppositions but words that combine to (hopefully) produce un-rational anti-categories. The aim is to allow (encourage) the archive to be read in ways counter to normative or reductive categories. To allow things in the archive to appear in sometimes unlikely groupings and to resist essentialism.
In Ramayya’s visionary poetry, the body assumes as many forms as love produces states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self.
Chip will read some of his great literary pornography, which pushes sexuality to the point of extremity and exhaustion.
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
A prison abolitionist punk video-poetry-music mash up about our fucked-up dystopian society, RoboCop, kids toys and criminality.
In which Storyboard P and members of Project X pick a song, freestyle to it, chat with us about what dancing means to them, then pick another song, freestyle, chat, repeat…
Mashed up queer fantasy of worker’s revolts, biblical demons and present-day hells, and dubbed out cyborg-electro.
Moor Mother is a musician, Philadelphian housing activist and black quantum futurist.
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.
Trans-temporal drag, sexuality and the re-staging of illegible moments in history.
A historical narrative of the black and Latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to race, gender, sexuality and class oppressions.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?