 
Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
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.
 
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
 
An evening extravaganza celebrating the London launch of Truth & Lies: an Anthology of Writing and Art by Sex Workers
Expect slutty DJs, playful performances, stripper poles, rococo cakes, union broads and intimate readings…
 
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening?
 
One of the most influential groups in improvised music, with the collective understanding that comes from listening keenly to each other for decades
 
Boston duo of saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelley approach their improvisations with a slew if extended techniques and pregnant silences.
 
A film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
 
A performance for dry ice and four specially constructed steel tables, each one heated by a single candle until searingly hot.
 
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
 
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
 
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.
 
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
 
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?