Bleu Shut
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
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.
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
Nikos played every note that it’s possible to play on the cello, all played back as a one hour drone, while the cello was turned to powder and bottled.
An LSD trip gone right via dense explorations of post-Fahey steel and low level drone.
Boston duo of saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelley approach their improvisations with a slew if extended techniques and pregnant silences.
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 dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
A beautifully crisp, slowly evolving duo for cello and projected images. Abstract but still figurative; change only noticeable after the fact.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
A crash-course in pre-figurative, radical, queer, anti-racist, anti-police, anti-prison, anti-deportation abolitionist politics and trans-resistance.
How do grassroots feminist organisations strategise relationships between mothers, parents, carers and their children based on respect and empowerment, in resistance to the practice of putting children in often the most uncaring of places – care.
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?