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.
“Introduction to Protactile Theory” is a legendary seminar that facilitator John Lee Clark has designed to bring diverse communities into conversation with the Protactile movement.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
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 performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.
A carefully thought out, simple but rich performance using just a turntable, teach yourself foreign language LP’s, the impeccable timing of a percussionist, and an idea.
A glance at both analogue and digital processes; the clarity and precision of digital colour or the yawning, endless depth of dye and emulsion, our programme celebrates how both approaches revel in colour, saturation, hue and tone.
Daniel Carter & Sabir Mateen’s trio with percussionist Andrew Barker; incessantly driving forward through sweat-drenched bursts of pure ecstatic freedom.
60 cycle hums, jagged static cracklings, and clipped electron pinpricks, mutating them into sublime, post-techno grooves
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
A double bill of Morgan Fisher films that ask what can be achieved by a simple structural method of commenting on scraps of 35mm film, re-shot on 16mm film and what happens to meaning (if anything) when ‘insert shots’ are relieved of their original duty of providing crucial plot development for a variety of other movies?
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
