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.
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.
The Truth and Lies book project emerges as part of a rising tide of sex worker art and organised struggle to end criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work.
Using violin and cello the duo map out a twilight sonic world that seems to tread the faultlines between improvisation and composition.
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.
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.
A talk entitled ‘The Conquest of the Universe’: which delves into the connections between the underground filmmakers and musicians in New York in the early 1960s
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.
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
The Tower performance at KYTN throws into that mix the 70’s fluxus light shows and films of Jeff Perkins and other filmic interventions tuned to their unique frequency.
One of the great experimental films. A 60 minute, three part riddle that maybe approximates our intellectual development by moving from imageless words to the recognition of silent images and the learning of simple tasks and finally a serenity and acceptance of death.
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
