The Experiment: Pt. 1
Amiri Baraka Fred Moten Wadada Leo Smith Sonia Sanchez
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
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.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
Ellis’s processional, precessional cessation and continuation of movement and music comes to us via his forthcoming release Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed Editions, 2023)
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Rhodri Davies plays two deconstructed harps. Lee Patterson examines the sonic properties of burning nuts.
Three iconic figures from the Japanese underground assembled as a trio to stand in for the advertised duo of Junko and Jerome Noetinger who was unable to attend the festival due to illness.
An extravagant debauch of plush toys and ritual. Palestine performed a version of Strumming Music, a trance inducing investigation into overtone systems achievable on a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano.
Includes: a £20 note, stock fluctuations, an examination of words in the video medium, a linguistic challenge for your mind, a frame by frame dissection 50 words, shop front poetry, image and language head to head and newspapers under the microscope.
For day four of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will take up protocols for listening to the sound of freedom composed and facilitated by Fred Moten.
A performance by Storyboard P – one of the greatest Afrofuturist dancers on the planet.
A short chat about what we (Arika) might be trying to do with our program for the Biennial.