Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
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.
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
An improvisation that may or may not involve (typical) improvisation.
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.
A panel exploring the poetics of abolition. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.”
A collaborative performance where sound and image are created, performed and mediated by light, water and glass.
An original and beautifully simple performed installation forging a direct link between sound and image.
Chip’s written some of the greatest of all Sci-Fi and Fantasy—page turning character driven diamond-hard novels and short stories: each a lens that refracts our real-life struggles and desires.
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.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
Inspired by Delany’s Aye, and Gomorra. A spookily filmic world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction of their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
This performance brings together film, text and speech and temporarily constructs a filmic space to think through questions of resistance, and the choice and consequence of action vs. inaction: what does it mean to choose to not take part?