
Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
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.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
A chat with Eugene Thacker. Can we rethink the world as unthinkable, and without us?
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Complex ways of understanding our complex times. Maths & Poetics. Gesture & Physics. Collectivist Struggle & Desire. 5 days of performances, discussions, screenings and study sessions.
What’s the relationship between the eternal hum of the oceanic beloved and the persistence of vorticity in fluid dynamics? And how does Alice Coltrane’s harp help us stay there?
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
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.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Juliana’s performances chart the dissonant space and discrepancy between the presumed fixed norms of social life and the fluid lived experience those norms don’t allow for.
Kanta is a young Japanese artist with a home-made, short circuited take on electronics and physical phenomena which he uses in performance to produce close circuit systems of audio / video feedback.