Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
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 performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
A Study Session focused on the thinking of Ailton Krenak – one of the great leaders of the Brazilian indigenous movement – led by curators and artists Amilcar Packer Arissana Pataxó.
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 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.
Taku’s actions strip back musical performance to one of its original proposals: what is an action and how does it create a situation for spending time together, for paying attention?
This performance brings together film, text and speech and temporarily constructs a filmic space to think through questions of resistance, and the choice and consequence of action vs. inaction: what does it mean to choose to not take part?
A trance inducing, flickering investigation of structural and minimalist droning from one of the key thinkers in sound and image over the last 50 years
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
What does it mean to listen with the mind as well as the ears? A solo performance from the great avant-garde pianist.
Solo by Jean-Philippe Gross, a French electro-acoustic improviser, working with mixing board, cheap mics, small speakers and an analog synth, built around a honed interest in feedback.
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.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?