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.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
A programme that looks at how sound and image can be treated as variants in a collection of ordered objects; at how to create meaning from the similar, and to notice difference.
There are core ways in which our listening to the radio differs from other kinds of listening. What happens when we pay attention to how we pay attention?
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.
An open-ended moment in an ongoing series of films, notes, performances, diagrams and drawings which trace the questions they share. A “porous space between cinema time-space and lived time-space.”
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
Mashed up queer fantasy of worker’s revolts, biblical demons and present-day hells, and dubbed out cyborg-electro.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Paper Piece: Secrets is a performance for and with the whole audience, using paper, text, secrets, being in the crowd
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.
