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.
Glasgow based contemporary music group Paragon Ensemble performing an improvisation with Pete Dowling, Nick Fells, Robert Irvine and others.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Wordless, reverb drenched voice, ghosted electronics, seething and ferocious electronic damage and Patty Waters style vocal mania.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
A life force of ecstatic clarity capable of loquacious bursts of affirmation.
Quasi-theatrical multiple-projector pieces play with the relationship between performers, art and audiences.
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.
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.
Usurper luddite twins’ disabled instruments play a game of pick-up-sticks with the deconstructed horn of a young Derby opponent.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
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?
