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.
Poems are kisses, fists, and underground rivers. For all these reasons and many more, I am a poet.
No Wave, damaged garage jams and crazed instant vocal shrieks.
Junko’s screaming vocal in a nuanced, piercing duo with Urabe’s fuming and convulsive saxophone, far removed from the codes of musical tradition.
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
Vanessa Place talks at The Friday Event series at the Glasgow School of Art about her practice as a writer.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
The Echo project is an installation as audio guide for a crowd. And at the same time it’s a private conversation: with you, as one of 20 people in a room, a sort of public intimacy.
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.
A crash-course in pre-figurative, radical, queer, anti-racist, anti-police, anti-prison, anti-deportation abolitionist politics and trans-resistance.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
