The Experiment: Pt. 1
Amiri Baraka Fred Moten Wadada Leo Smith Sonia Sanchez
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
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.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
Inspired by Delany’s Aye, and Gomorra. A spookily filmic world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction of their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
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.
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.
A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled between the seen and the heard; a road trip played over and over from different perspectives.
A beautifully crisp, slowly evolving duo for cello and projected images. Abstract but still figurative; change only noticeable after the fact.
Argument is a provocative, multi-layered film essay, a trenchant analysis of the media and remains a critically relevant and critically inflammatory tract.
Complexly interacting colossal drones by the creator of some of the most legendary yet least heard music of the 70’s.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
Pitching Fahey inspired, eastern-infused folk vibrations, sad elliptical drones and oracle chants into one kaleidoscopic sound.