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?
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
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.
Paul Sharits is one of our all time heroes, and one of the great artist filmmakers of the 20th Century.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger for 4 pianos performed by Joe Kubera, Kate Thompson, David Murray, Alan Fearon and Simon Passmore.
Michael Colligan pressing white hot metal into dry ice, causing the metal to sing and scream.
Terry is one of the most entertaining and unpredictable musicians in the London free improvising music scene. Rhodri Davies extends his instrument under a battery of techniques creating sound colours and textures quite alien to the harp.
Elizabeth’s writing pulls apart toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify it; working towards an alternative distribution of powers, so that ways of being otherwise can endure.
