 
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?
 
During their time in Scotland for Instal 06 Dave Dove, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelly did some improvisation workshops and performances in and around Glasgow.
 
The first of two short film programmes featuring works that blur the boundaries between music and film from artists who cross and redefine those long held divisions. This programme focuses on the forebearers of filmic and musical innovation over the last 70 years.
 
Copying without Copying is 3 evenings of events that are about what happens when we speak, or when we hear someone speak on our behalf, when we share a collective moment of hearing and maybe understanding.
 
Two bottomless brunch writing workshops—with readings—speculating the relationship between space, infrastructure, technologies and sex.
 
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
 
A performance by Storyboard P – one of the greatest Afrofuturist dancers on the planet.
 
A double bill of Morgan Fisher films that ask what can be achieved by a simple structural method of commenting on scraps of 35mm film, re-shot on 16mm film and what happens to meaning (if anything) when ‘insert shots’ are relieved of their original duty of providing crucial plot development for a variety of other movies?
 
Two-parts Helhesten spit strangled shanties and cracked reeds from under a net of the Glasgow Improv Orchestra’s six-strings and one moustache.
 
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Edinburgh. Nigh-inaudible improv jams with disabled instruments from the makers of Giant Tank and Pizza Boy Delivery.
 
This performance brings together film, text and speech and temporarily constructs a filmic space to think through questions of resistance, and the choice and consequence of action vs. inaction: what does it mean to choose to not take part?