Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
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.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
A sort of prayer and conference, a sort of scream and dialogue – a monologue and declaration at the time, addressing how we can build complicity with one another.
Durational group-mind drone and clatter: bamboo, electronics, the contents of your local ironmongers bin. A 3-hour set from this legendary Japanese improvisation group.
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
Jandek’s first ever live performance. Unannounced, the performance was a total surprise for everybody at the festival.
Patented 60 cycle hums, static pops, and terse electron pinpricks mutated into perfect, post-techno grooves and synaesthesic video
Elizabeth’s writing pulls apart toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify it; working towards an alternative distribution of powers, so that ways of being otherwise can endure.
A dense materialist experience at the limits of contemporary computer music, drawing on Korean Shamanism and Communism; striving to create a strange new vibration to the world that seems to contain the seed of everything.
A recreation of one of Gustav Metzger’s celebrated auto destructive performances.
An open-ended moment in an ongoing series of films, notes, performances, diagrams and drawings which trace the questions they share. A “porous space between cinema time-space and lived time-space.”
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.