Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
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.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
Sax/Drums duo of raucous, pealing noise, and cries of beguiling lyricism, whispered sax phrases float in a timbral cloud of bowed metal and rumbling toms.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
A programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
Dworkin asks: What would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion?
Expansive and considered, inclusive and deeply human minimalism: Antoine Beuger, Radu Malfatti, Manfred Werder.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
Discussion: If we approach “care as an event” rather than as a “contract of exchange” then what becomes possible in how we know, care for, and appreciate each other?
Captures the creak and rustle of the forest, with an exhilarating tension let loose in unconfined maniacal and bare-knuckle group thinking.
Umeda is a Japanese artist who is as fascinated in setting up interesting situations to observe, as he is in creating performances.