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.
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.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
Our Zooms are unmuted, our mics are open, and our hearts and bodyminds are receptive. We give the floor online and in person to you…
Wave Formations is a 5 screen work in which each screen runs through a series of fades and then stroboscopic flashes of colour, to create a series of visual harmonics.
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
Sound as it is endured by space and the body: 15 participants lie face down and pound the floor with a microphone one thousand times, each person choosing their own rhythm and intensity.
Camille Sapara Barton author of Tending Grief will facilitate this BIPOC only session around somatics and racial justice.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Jarrod Fowler creates a social space where layered one-to-one live encounters with the audience become sonic material.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
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.
