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.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
Light Music is a dizzying celebration of the pivotal nature of sound in film; a direct and powerful transcription of film as sound.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
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.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage
Work for cello, percussion, contra bassoon and cherbulum commissioned for Instal in collaboration with Paragon
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.
A 100 strong Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by composer Phil Minton.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
Inspired by Delany’s Aye, and Gomorra. A spookily filmic world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction of their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
