 
Speculum Orum
M Lamar
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.
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 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.
 
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
 
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.
 
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
 
Captures the creak and rustle of the forest, with an exhilarating tension let loose in unconfined maniacal and bare-knuckle group thinking.
 
Acoustic turntable, engines, trumpet and accordion joined by Bassist Magarida Garcia: build long-form quietly detailed pieces that clatter and rumble, that expand and contract with the tension and release of deeply held breath.
 
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
 
Can a musician create a sonic photograph; something with a depth of field, where you can hear sounds and their interconnections, much as you see objects and their relationships in a photo? Could a filmmaker use musical concepts to represent landscape?
 
Beyond time, colorlines, ability, and sexuality, a movement exploration into what it means to see and be seen, how hearing contrast with what is actually being heard.
 
A silent performance of (musical) reverberation.
 
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
 
Film and sound stripped of ‘content’ and experienced spatially, to be looked at not on the screen but in the space of the gallery