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.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
Paul Sharits one of the great experimental, sometimes called structuralist / materialist, filmmakers of the 20th Century.
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.
Organised by Twiggy Pucci Garcon and Pony Zion, The Masters Ball focuses on the work of 50 individuals designated within the scene as ‘masters’ in their respective performance categories, which include Vogue, Runway, and Face.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of light emerge, as the emulsion is scratched from the surface of the film. Simultaneously, out of the black silence, noise and audible scratches bloom into a bright drone.
An contradictory guitarist, he’s equally at home in slow, halting acoustic improvisation or piercing minimal examinations of electric guitar.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
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.
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
Three iconic figures from the Japanese underground assembled as a trio to stand in for the advertised duo of Junko and Jerome Noetinger who was unable to attend the festival due to illness.
