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.
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
CCI Sound system: a performance in which new material will be mixed and phased between two huge PA’s, one a precise Meyer system, the other a huge wall of Marshall amps
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.
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.
We’ll look at the language and politics of what gets ‘mental health’ and consider more holistic understandings of experiences that honour the connection between mind/body/soul, and that acknowledge social and political context.
Paul Sharits’ Shutter Interface is a multi screen installation born of an intent to reveal the material substance of cinema in its purest form: spatially.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
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.
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
An evening of live performances, readings & saucy rococo cakes celebrating the launch of Truth and Lies – An Anthology of Writing and Art by Sex Workers.
Out holler/ howl of English pukenoise posterboys exploded by incessant insect chatter of Northern fug dweller.
