
In Our Hands 2025
In Our Hands is a nine week programme of workshops exploring radical approaches to health and collective care in the movement for liberation and social justice.
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 Our Hands is a nine week programme of workshops exploring radical approaches to health and collective care in the movement for liberation and social justice.
We’ll be looking at decolonising ‘global mental health’. We’ll look at the concepts of decoloniality, of things being ‘culture bound’, and at hermeneutical injustice* as ways to examine dominator knowledge systems, and the institution of psych/iatry.
In this session we’ll explore the use of herbs to support psycho-emotional health*, especially focusing on considering ‘nervines’; herbs that support rest, relaxation, that soothe, ground, vitalise and nourish. We’ll also be looking at personal constitutions and plant energetics. And we’ll briefly touch on the use of entheogens (psychoactive substances such as magic mushrooms) as medicine.
For day three of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will take up protocols for listening to the sound of freedom composed and facilitated by Nancy Nevárez.
Sarah Washington uses electronics and wind-up radios, running out of charge to repsond to the festivals’ Self Cancellation provocation.
Beatriz will explore her thinking, on film as translation, plural subjectivity or land-based militancy. Discussion will centre around her work Oriana and its companion piece Oenanthe, which will be screened in full.
Equal parts spectacle, installation and performance, his set for us is a specially developed work, ‘turning’, which features an orchestra of multiple turntables, 4 projections and a collection of old, and, quite probably, misfiring analogue kit.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
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.
Slowly evolving ultra-subtle harmonics and multi-tracked, otherworldly drones that only reveal their true power at high volume.
Goofily deformed, deeply thought vocal jams: like the sound of your own breath rushing through your head.
Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann return with their diaphanous, impressionistic drone duo; their slowly evolving and enthralling works flutter and quiver with elegantly restrained, miniature sound events.