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.
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?
One-shot sonic portraits of 4 houses, their inhabitants and their relationship to sound, from 2 of the most deep-thinking field-recording artists around.
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
We wanted to ask a bunch of the best high-energy-improvisers around; can musical form really taking shape via a group energy? Can individual concentration lead to a group consciousness?
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Michael Colligan pressing white hot metal into dry ice, causing the metal to sing and scream.
Can our favourite Vegas-born poet of prophetic blackness and a South Central transmuter of social rage into beauty feel through each other?
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
Arika is working in partnership with Decriminalised Futures on a multi year collaboration featuring multiple creative projects exploring sex worker lives, experiences and movement struggles.
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
