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.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
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.
Solo performance by Diamanda Galás one of the great artists of the last forty years. Hers is an emotional expressionism of demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, glottal clicks and diabolical growls.
A film installation as both allegory and investigation of The Rockridge Institute and their research into ‘framing’ and the use of metaphor within political discourse.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
A multi-media harp and spoken word tribute to the incalculable, the in-deducible, the suspicious static noise that accompanies the voice of truth, and the attempted aberrations in the domain of emergence.
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
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?
A dismantled, performed film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience.
An audio/ video, lecture/ performance exploring the queer and companionly inter-activity of human-animal relations.
An extravagant debauch of huge pianos, plush toys, cognac and ritual.
