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.
Work grouped in this theme might deal with bringing something from the past back into a present day context or perhaps the literal and/or obsessive repetition of something many times over. Highlights include the loud and emotional collective reading of Zong!, or the epic public reading of transcripts from one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that took place at U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. It is our intention that the paired ‘terms’ that this theme is comprised of are not synonyms nor are they binary oppositions but words that combine to (hopefully) produce un-rational anti-categories. The aim is to allow (encourage) the archive to be read in ways counter to normative or reductive categories. To allow things in the archive to appear in sometimes unlikely groupings and to resist essentialism.
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?
Sound as it is endured by space and the body: 15 participants lie face down and pound the floor with a microphone one thousand times, each person choosing their own rhythm and intensity.
Copying without Copying is 3 evenings of events that are about what happens when we speak, or when we hear someone speak on our behalf, when we share a collective moment of hearing and maybe understanding.
Somewhere between performance, stripped down theatre and an intense kind of public learning or maybe even a public hearing.
A performed installation by one of Germany’s most interesting visual artists, based on edited transcripts of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and the writings of Hannah Arendt
A performed reflection on Malin’s previous re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art from the French feminist and artist Gina Pane.
This performance brings together film, text and speech and temporarily constructs a filmic space to think through questions of resistance, and the choice and consequence of action vs. inaction: what does it mean to choose to not take part?
A performance, a radio show, an installation, an endurance test. A game of chance. Constantly broadcasting live, actor Tam Dean Burn will leave Tramway at the start of INSTAL and walk away from it, in an ever increasing spiral, for a day. Then he’ll walk back.
Listening to people listening to their own homes. Musicians and actors will listen back to recordings made in local peoples homes on headphones, and interpret/ translate what they are hearing.
The Echo project is an installation as audio guide for a crowd. And at the same time it’s a private conversation: with you, as one of 20 people in a room, a sort of public intimacy.
Temporary Outpost for an Auditory Gesture is a kind of performed installation that explores how sonic phenomena (like feedback, vibration, resonance, echo, rhythm) condition our experience.
A carefully thought out, simple but rich performance using just a turntable, teach yourself foreign language LP’s, the impeccable timing of a percussionist, and an idea.