Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
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.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
A life force of ecstatic clarity capable of loquacious bursts of affirmation.
Amid the blur of erotics, the jangle of poetics, and the fetishizing of sickness and disability, the heat of Panteha’s performance and sculpture freezes all.
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
Dead Labour Process drool-tape farmer, squeaking/creaking Usurper brother and Peeesseye’s yodelling traps-man hold a real OUT splutter party.
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
Julius’ “small music” features simple snatches of found sound, played back through small speakers, often set in bowls of pigment and dirt which shimmies in the vibrations.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an old underground reservoir in Fife.
Vajra are a Japanese psychedelic rock supergroup, hewn from the collective consciousness of Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, folk radical Kan Mikami and percussionist Toshiaki Ishitsuka.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.