
Hotel Diaries 1-8
John Smith
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
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.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
“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
Long Stringed Instrument performance involving up to 100 wires strung in tension over a 40m arch.
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
This event honoured those individuals who achieved the status of Icon during the period of 1986-1990.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
Somewhere between performance, stripped down theatre and an intense kind of public learning or maybe even a public hearing.
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.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
Paper Piece: Secrets is a performance for and with the whole audience, using paper, text, secrets, being in the crowd