Episode 1: A Film is a Statement
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
Ken Jacobs chats to Edwin Carels: Edwin is a curator based in Ghent, responsible for some fantastic programmes of experimental film and art at the Rotterdam Film festival (amongst others).
A testimony to poverty from Chris’s own experiences, and an invitation to engage with an all too typical situation and context through a kind of imaginary listening.
Mirror and Phantom Engineer performing an improvised soundtrack to Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 horror film prototype, Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages.
Philip Jeck creates slowly evolving symphonies that are as much about the crackling hiss of old vinyl as the actual ‘musical’ material.
An improvised film about our worlds at the brink, on the edge, in front of a crisis. To stand on the side of life, by seeing the resistance to genocide in Palestine as a turning point to overcome.
NVA asked Arika to curate and programme the sound aspects of their 2007 Half-Life production in Kilmartin Glen. Arika worked with Toshiya Tsunoda, Lee Patterson, Rhodri Davies and Angharad Davies.
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.
Two figureheads of the minimalist electronica pulse, Ikeda and Nicolai have been responsible for some of the most innovative and ground-breaking music of the last decade, redefining experimental electronica.
AVVA sees the internal feedback of Toshi’s no-input mixing desk is fed to Billy, and transformed into bright and variegated patters, striations and blooming colour, before being fed back to Toshi and manipulated on route to the PA.
Tiny fragments of sound recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces