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.
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
Haunted by the archive of the New Cross Fire, Jay Bernard presents a film and poetry reading that undertakes a queer exploration of black British history, reconstructed from archives and apparent debris.
A performed self-cancelling discussion, with artists from the festival, invited speakers and local artists talking at once, over each other, or straining to be heard over the din.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
A collaborative social justice project that uses art, activism and awareness to combat the systemic oppression facing young, trans, queer & gender nonconforming people of colour.
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.
An immersive environment where sound is looped through oscillators, radio, guitar pick-ups and video amps to create dense strobing images and colours
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”
TEST is a collective creative improvising quartet based out of the NYC Underground (figuratively and literally). Their street-hardened, spatial Jazz is riotous and intense: is also makes us think about collective organization, and different ideas of responsibility and liberty.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.
