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.
The final iteration of Arika’s INSTAL festivals, the 2010 edition was an experimental festival of experimental music – 3 days of events at the Tramway that explored un-average ideas about sound and music.
Three intense solo performances for drums (both played and screamed through), cymbal, voice, credit card, bird whistle, and guitar amplifier/leads.
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.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
Acoustic turntable, engines, trumpet and accordion joined by Bassist Magarida Garcia: build long-form quietly detailed pieces that clatter and rumble, that expand and contract with the tension and release of deeply held breath.
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.
Ecstatic, scalding and ludicrously heavy, nobody matches Incapacitants for live noise energy. One of the most exhilarating live acts in underground music.
A performed, open, public conversation about how we might think politics from the position of intuition, in which Denise and Valentina use un-reasonable tools to map out a hybrid poetical/ ethical reading of their own situations.
One of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation discusses practices of Indigenous Resurgence drawn from Nishnaabeg poetic knowledge.
Chip will read some of his great literary pornography, which pushes sexuality to the point of extremity and exhaustion.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
A trio of Tamio’s screaming and immovable slabs of sound; Mico’s dance/ performance/ piano; Fritz’s absurd, flailing percussion/ voice.
