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.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
A double bill. A simple first person, Dundee-specific tracking shot that approaches the cinema/ screen/ space the film will eventually be shown in and in Brazilian opera house, a fixed camera gazes at a local audience from the stage: a choir, hidden in the orchestra pit, sings and gradually fades to silence.
“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
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
Merzbow takes the junk of sound and transforms it into blistering noise assaults with an incredible spectrum and impact.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
How do we sense entanglement? Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter?
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a remote sea cave near Durness.
The most sophisticated synthetic music around: timbrally otherwise body music as sonified fictions and auditive sociograms.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
