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.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
A film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
What’s the relationship between the eternal hum of the oceanic beloved and the persistence of vorticity in fluid dynamics? And how does Alice Coltrane’s harp help us stay there?
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
MICRO 1 – Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a light bundle. Keep the microphone live for another 5 minutes. T. Kosugi – (1961)
Sound as it is endured by space and the body: 15 participants lie face down and pound the floor with a microphone one thousand times, each person choosing their own rhythm and intensity.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
