 
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?
 
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
 
Avant-wrongdoers Blood Stereo performing in Garthamlock the town spawned them.
 
A programme of discontinuity between narration, text and image. Including Manual Saiz’s employment of John Malkovich’s Spanish dubbing double and Peter Rose’s absurdly hilarious concrete poetry subtitling chaos.
 
Quintessentially British, The Bohman Brothers’ music is a home-made and DIY conflux of some of the most virulent strains of experimental music.
 
A stroboscopic and intense sensory overload of flashing abstract forms, cut to ribbons by modified projectors.
 
US percussionist, poet, sound artist and instrument maker performing on self-made instruments constructed from industrial materials such as stainless steel, titanium, PVC plastics and various kinds of pipe.
 
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
 
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.
 
An original and beautifully simple performed installation forging a direct link between sound and image.
 
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
 
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing by the Stones of Stenness, instead of the Ring of Brodgar, because of bad weather.