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.
Haunted by the archive of the New Cross Fire, Jay Bernard presents a film and poetry reading that undertakes a queer exploration of black British history, reconstructed from archives and apparent debris.
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
A system in which oscillators shake The Arches, seismographs pick up the harmonics that are then amplified through massive sub-bass PA.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Inspired by Delany’s Aye, and Gomorra. A spookily filmic world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction of their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
A performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
Investigating the border between the audible and the visible means looking at the margins, the edges of creativity where artists test out new boundaries and define them anew.
A conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
Three intense solo performances for drums (both played and screamed through), cymbal, voice, credit card, bird whistle, and guitar amplifier/leads.
