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.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
Blood Stereo & Ludo Mich: linking past and present generations of DIY intuitive expression in a post fluxus ‘big mess’.
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
A community of those without community, for a community to come. A schizo-scenic video-collage of the disturbing ‘normality’ of Moby Dick.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
Perhaps the paradigm of America’s covert musical subculture, Sun City Girls operate just over the border of raucous delirium.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
