Cello Powder
Nikos Veliotis
Nikos played every note that it’s possible to play on the cello, all played back as a one hour drone, while the cello was turned to powder and bottled.
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.
Nikos played every note that it’s possible to play on the cello, all played back as a one hour drone, while the cello was turned to powder and bottled.
A solo improvisation using just the situation of the concert: a space, a PA, Mattin’s own thoughts, you, the audience.
How do people living with disability see themselves in today’s sexualised culture? How do we imagine our crip sexual selves despite society wanting to reduce us to non-erotic bodies?
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
A poetic multi-screen performance about “the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence”. About time and change.
Black-clad with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jams.
Nothing if not repetitive, film is founded on the incremental succession of minute difference. But how does repetition of the same play out, and is it a tool to comment on the standardising repetition of the mass media?
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
An original and beautifully simple performed installation forging a direct link between sound and image.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Acting at the minimum. Each film here substitutes one small thing for another, (ironically) transforming received meanings by the simplest of actions; often kind of funny too.