
Suspended closure, suspended
Jimmy Robert
When we look, how do we objectify the body; how can we reflect on our (self) image as a construction?
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.
When we look, how do we objectify the body; how can we reflect on our (self) image as a construction?
Databases carry the same seeds of creativity that early documentary makers saw in film. Both can empower people by helping them to master information, both can be claimed to represent some kind of reality or truth.
Juliana’s performances chart the dissonant space and discrepancy between the presumed fixed norms of social life and the fluid lived experience those norms don’t allow for.
West Coast drone-age guitar grumbler/ consumer electronic reclaimer meets free-thinking clang/ chime/ drone bluesman of The East.
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
John Butcher plays and manipulates a feeding back saxophone. Benedict Drew on electronics, broken cables and standing waves.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
A cinema of the mind, a film to take place in the viewers’ imagination(s).
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?