Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
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.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
UK conceptual/ drone/ noise artist, who is seriously posing what might seem to be unanswerable questions of music.
In Ramayya’s visionary poetry, the body assumes as many forms as love produces states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
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.
Open-ended, paradoxical and performed investigations into: misunderstanding, language games, form saturated with sense, and consecutive matters…
Do ideas emerging from particle physics help to re-think of blackness as a mode of life in which it’s possible to practice difference without separation?
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
The role of feelings in public life, (political) depression and creative survival.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.