
Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
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.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of light emerge, as the emulsion is scratched from the surface of the film. Simultaneously, out of the black silence, noise and audible scratches bloom into a bright drone.
This set continues on from the Bud Neill inspired clatter using the contents of the Usurper twin’s pockets.
A kind of audience activating, structured film guessing game in the manipulation of time, sound and image. “At 11:15, weiners. At 21:05, pornography. At 23:30, a duet. Watch the Clock.”
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
Gravitational Feel is an engine for intensifying the differentiation of our entanglement, which you continually reprogramme in the mutual rub, shift and lap of its sonic, wooden, steel, textile and human material.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
Individual experience separated by physical boundaries (of space, time or ability) suggested as communities of collective experience by (perhaps voyeuristic) artists.
Arika is working in partnership with Decriminalised Futures on a multi year collaboration featuring multiple creative projects exploring sex worker lives, experiences and movement struggles.