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.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
Solo organ performance by German composer Eva-Maria Houben, which focuses on ‘nearly nothing’ to expand the way we listen.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
How black radical practices of abolition imagine a way out of the caging and mass killing of life.
The ongoing development of [b]reach, an abolitionist black queer retelling of Marge Piercy’s incredible feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time.
Introducing and setting intentions for a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves.
An improvised film about our worlds at the brink, on the edge, in front of a crisis. To stand on the side of life, by seeing the resistance to genocide in Palestine as a turning point to overcome.
An extravagant debauch of plush toys and ritual. Palestine performed a version of Strumming Music, a trance inducing investigation into overtone systems achievable on a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano.
