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.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
Vajra are a Japanese psychedelic rock supergroup, hewn from the collective consciousness of Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, folk radical Kan Mikami and percussionist Toshiaki Ishitsuka.
A performed self-cancelling discussion, with artists from the festival, invited speakers and local artists talking at once, over each other, or straining to be heard over the din.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
Solo organ performance by German composer Eva-Maria Houben, which focuses on ‘nearly nothing’ to expand the way we listen.
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.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
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.
Veterans of the psych-infused UK free noise scene, the Vibracathedral Orchestra is a hypnotic ur-drone group hailing from Leeds.
