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 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.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
Is it possible to dance our way out of the hardened stances and identity prisons we are locked in?
A three-day celebration surveying all manner of diverse musical activities, which at their core share a basic kinship: one of exploration and the discovery of musical expresssion.
Junko’s screaming vocal in a nuanced, piercing duo with Urabe’s fuming and convulsive saxophone, far removed from the codes of musical tradition.
Hartmut led “a workshop in the old-fashioned way of discussion, mutual exploration of ideas and samples; trying out what can be shared and where the fault lines show.”
A solo improvisation using just the situation of the concert: a space, a PA, Mattin’s own thoughts, you, the audience.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
Introducing and setting intentions for a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves.
A dense materialist experience at the limits of contemporary computer music, drawing on Korean Shamanism and Communism; striving to create a strange new vibration to the world that seems to contain the seed of everything.
