
Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
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?
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.
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?
Includes: a classic of innovative computer graphics, ex-pat Scot McLaren on form, a riotous psychedelic oil show with a Soft Machine accompaniment, subtle manipulation of data feedback, a colourful road movie and a reworking of a lost Paul Sharits film.
Junko’s screaming vocal in a nuanced, piercing duo with Urabe’s fuming and convulsive saxophone, far removed from the codes of musical tradition.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
Goodwin’s writing emanates from the social life of poetry, from a condition of entanglement before historically racially-specific forms of representation. Another word for this emanation is breath.
How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
A panel exploring the radical potential of technologies through fugitivity and opacity: their ability to obscure, to make it impossible for us to be known, to render us untraceable by every arm of the state even under the all-consuming spectre of surveillance capital.
“Hidden in the hands an alluvial transcription of reach and embrace. The final flickers of the body’s expression, caress and touch.” – boychild
Patented 60 cycle hums, static pops, and terse electron pinpricks mutated into perfect, post-techno grooves and synaesthesic video
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of light emerge, as the emulsion is scratched from the surface of the film. Simultaneously, out of the black silence, noise and audible scratches bloom into a bright drone.