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.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
UNINSTAL was a set of events at Tramway that tested out radical ideas with leading local and international artists. A collection of events (performances, films, installations, walks and talks) about sound and listening.
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage
Nina’s going to talk about November, by Hito Steyerl: what and how the film thinks, or about what and how it might makes us think (which is connected, but not the same thing), by watching, and it discussing (with you?).
Includes: a classic of innovative computer graphics, ex-pat Scot McLaren on form, a riotous psychedelic oil show with a Soft Machine accompaniment, subtle manipulation of data feedback, a colourful road movie and a reworking of a lost Paul Sharits film.
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
Guy Sherwin gives a kind of annotated, chat through his optical sound films
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.
Where we join Nackt Insecten’s disembodied spectral howls and heavyweight locomotive drones about SPT’s Subway.
This session focuses in on the defiant mutual aid practices of early and DIY feminist movements in the UK, that attempted to shift and radicalise care and kinship away from the domain of the nuclear family.
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.
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
