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 a moment of social exhaustion, we want to ask how we might care for each other differently. We Can’t Live Without Our Lives is a 5-day exploration of care as a form of struggle and resistance, with communities who embody it.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an old underground reservoir in Fife.
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
A cinema of the mind, a film to take place in the viewers’ imagination(s).
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
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.
Guy Sherwin gives a kind of annotated, chat through his optical sound films
Nina’s going to talk about November, by Hito Steyerl: what and how the film thinks, or about what and how it might makes us think (which is connected, but not the same thing), by watching, and it discussing (with you?).
A specially commissioned performance for organ. “The course of the stars were to be put to sound.”
Hijokaidan rapidly built a following due to the overwhelmingly physical intensity of their live performances, often involving destructive onstage rituals of vomit, urine, mangled guitars and ear shredding volume.
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.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
