
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.
Our Zooms are unmuted, our mics are open, and our hearts and bodyminds are receptive. We give the floor online and in person to you…
A series of badly felted lock-ups and garages + multiple locations within the Megastructure – a purpose built town centre in one building, comprising (in the 50’s at least) of housing (never occupied), shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities
This programme is a celebration of Charlemagne Palestine; passionate, extravagant, visceral. Including two sections from Ritual dans le Vide, an extension of his ‘running camera’ works of the 70’s and Pip Chodorov’s vibrant workout of a live version of Strumming Music.
A confrontational and somehow shamanic stance; introspective silences shattered by savage jabs at the strings, whirlwind strums dying into spartan chords
A collaboration bringing together artists with a shared gravitational heft to their work; an intense and concentrated accumulation of detail and power.
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.
Tiny fragments of sound recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
Black-clad with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jams.
A panel exploring the radical potential of technologies through fugitivity and opacity: their ability to obscure, to make it impossible for us to be known, to render us untraceable by every arm of the state even under the all-consuming spectre of surveillance capital.
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.