Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
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.
A festival asking how ideas of nihilism, darkness, subjectivity and abjection play out in experimental music, performance art, horror, neuroscience and philosophy?
Chris Corsano, Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in the Hamilton Mausoleum, Hamilton.
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.
During Episode 9 we made this clip with Storyboard P at Kinning Park Complex. Video by Ash Reid.
A performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
Vajra are a Japanese psychedelic rock supergroup, hewn from the collective consciousness of Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, folk radical Kan Mikami and percussionist Toshiaki Ishitsuka.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
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.