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.
Three documentary films exploring diverse realities of sex workers around the world followed by a closing ceremony of the festival.
A celebration of our overabundant social entanglement and complicity, that remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.
Beat poet Ira Cohen’s now infamous and wildly psychedelic film odyssey feeds one’s own seeing apparatus through beautifully warped and distorting mylar mirrors, resulting in a film dense and rich with visual arcana and poetry.
Sarah Washington uses electronics and wind-up radios, running out of charge to repsond to the festivals’ Self Cancellation provocation.
Ever wondered about the roadside festoons which are the innards of discarded cassette tapes? All will be revealed in this methodical and insightful documentary by UK luminary John Smith and sound artist cohort Graeme Miller.
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.
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.
John Butcher plays and manipulates a feeding back saxophone. Benedict Drew on electronics, broken cables and standing waves.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
Sonic ‘observations’ of the world, through micro recordings on a tiny scale and transformed into something musically compelling.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
