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.
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
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.
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.
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.
Lo-fidelity sheets of parinirvanic mangled tone get driven into oblivion by two longstanding gurus of the Northern England primitivist noise.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
Boston duo of saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelley approach their improvisations with a slew if extended techniques and pregnant silences.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
Temporary Outpost for an Auditory Gesture is a kind of performed installation that explores how sonic phenomena (like feedback, vibration, resonance, echo, rhythm) condition our experience.
