Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
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 art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
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.
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
A glance at both analogue and digital processes; the clarity and precision of digital colour or the yawning, endless depth of dye and emulsion, our programme celebrates how both approaches revel in colour, saturation, hue and tone.
Joe Colley specialises in hotwired sound constructions full of ominous electronic disturbances and caustic, noxious drones. For KYTN, Joe created a situation of controlled chaos with 50 light sensitive oscillators placed in a field of candles.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Performing with hand built radio transmitters, which react to interference in the atmosphere and the electrical impedance of his hands, his radio art is a form of social practice; a statement in opposition to mass media.
Conceptual writer and practicing lawyer Vanessa Place performs and talks with Mark Sanders, author of the brilliant “Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid”
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage
A multi-speaker, electronic, spacious and spatial performance from Florian Hecker.
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.