
Hotel Diaries 1-8
John Smith
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
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.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
Setting up a minimal procedure to explore the interaction between a person and the (documentary) film/ video process. What initially seems simple ends up contrarily distanced and intimate, public and private.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
The practice of North African Indigenous revolutionary love, in the face of European capitalist violence and settler colonialism, with one of the most vital anti-colonial thinkers in Europe.
A spectacular musical show which discusses the representation of a nation state, its characters and history. A learning play on myth construction and its reproduction.
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.
(Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows using the formula of morning radio as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behaviour and controlled empathy of systematic care.
An invitation into languages field of touch; to speak in feeling together.
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?