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.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
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.
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
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?
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?
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
