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.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
A performance for dry ice and four specially constructed steel tables, each one heated by a single candle until searingly hot.
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
A series of badly felted lock-ups and garages + multiple locations within the Megastructure – a purpose built town centre in one building, comprising (in the 50’s at least) of housing (never occupied), shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities
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 kind of performed installation of searing noise and silence, where we’re not sure who the performer is, when it starts or ends or even who it’s for.
Paul Sharits is one of our all time heroes, and one of the great artist filmmakers of the 20th Century.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
Location: between: the abandoned site of Parker House (ex-council office building) that became a student accommodation regeneration project, off the Dudhope roundabout; Bell Street Car Park entrance ramp and; the awkward (and otherwise used/ used otherwise) space left over between the back of Tesco’s and DW Sports on the Murraygate.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in an abandoned oil tanker on Hoy.
