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.
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
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.
4 days of performances, discussions, workshops, screenings with mutant dancers, prison abolitionist poets, transfeminist revolutionaries, haunted noise, science fiction, sex worker resistance, crip erotics, radical pornography and militant fiction.
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.
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Free jazz pianist John Blum with an everywhere-at-once presence in duo with Jackson Krall, incendiary free jazz drummer and sound sculptor
Ken presents his Nervous Magic Lantern, wherein film itself is forsaken for an investigation of hypnotic and trancelike crystaline forms. Eric La Casa works with recordings of everyday occurrences: the background hum of place.
Performances at CCA Glasgow by Keiji Haino, My Cat Is An Alien, Taurpis Tula, Jandek with Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson.
