Birchville Cat Motel
Birchville Cat Motel
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
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.
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
Real-time video feedback loops submerged in laminal sheets of sound soaked in gauzy timbral detail and multi-valenced, buzzing overtones.
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
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.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Where we join Nackt Insecten’s disembodied spectral howls and heavyweight locomotive drones about SPT’s Subway.
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
A film performance about Guy then, and Guy now, as a metaphor for the passing of time, which of course all film is inherently about.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
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?
Argument is a provocative, multi-layered film essay, a trenchant analysis of the media and remains a critically relevant and critically inflammatory tract.