Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
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.
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
A 100 strong Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by composer Phil Minton.
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
Politicised fan-fiction chronicling working class gay urban space and fantasy.
Seven women recite monologues composed from texts from the vibrant years of the Weimar Republic. A kind of cultural echo: an experience of histories brought to the present.
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.
Personal Spaces: inversion of a territorial bell, confusing the realms between rehearsal and performance, public and private space.
A multi-media harp and spoken word tribute to the incalculable, the in-deducible, the suspicious static noise that accompanies the voice of truth, and the attempted aberrations in the domain of emergence.
The Truth and Lies book project emerges as part of a rising tide of sex worker art and organised struggle to end criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Listening to people listening to their own homes. Musicians and actors will listen back to recordings made in local peoples homes on headphones, and interpret/ translate what they are hearing.
A historical narrative of the black and Latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to race, gender, sexuality and class oppressions.