Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
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.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
4 days of performances, discussions, workshops, screenings with mutant dancers, prison abolitionist poets, transfeminist revolutionaries, haunted noise, science fiction, sex worker resistance, crip erotics, radical pornography and militant fiction.
A performance by Storyboard P – one of the greatest Afrofuturist dancers on the planet.
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.
Improvising violinist Angharad Davies performing with pianists Tisha Mukarji and Andrea Neumann.
Opening with one of the most memorable shots ever filmed, and screened a year after the initial successes of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Too Soon, Too Late is a search for the traces left on the landscape of past revolutions in France and Egypt.
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
IN OUR LIFETIME, is an anti-imperialist resource, edited by Hussein Mitha, produced by Arika for Episode 11, featuring poetry, essays, questions, prompts, letters and works of anti-colonial imaginary.
Leading language/ action/ sound poet performed his groundbreaking concrete poem, a dizzying mandala of text, symbols and rubber stamps; a kind of book as reading machine.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
“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