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 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.
Leading language/ action/ sound poet performed his groundbreaking concrete poem, a dizzying mandala of text, symbols and rubber stamps; a kind of book as reading machine.
Reveling in the geometric, mathematical and perceptual relationship between sound and form, this programme features a landmark work of experimental film in Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer; a complex, enduring and expressive of structuralist or flicker films.
Solo organ performance by German composer Eva-Maria Houben, which focuses on ‘nearly nothing’ to expand the way we listen.
Autobiographical detail becomes a lens to reflect and refract the deepest aspects of personal and social life in Delany’s ground-breaking non-fiction writing.
Miniscule free-noise hissy-fits and broken instrument scrape/ squeal jams from the fools what brought you Giant Tank.
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”
A full-blooded, emotional attempt to reinvigorate improvisation from a musically inclined philosopher and two philosophically inclined improvisers.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
A concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.
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.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
