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.
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.
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.
From really simple, open instructions, An Unrhymed Chord creates a kind of half-way point between composition and improvisation.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
A talk entitled ‘The Conquest of the Universe’: which delves into the connections between the underground filmmakers and musicians in New York in the early 1960s
Austrian guitarist who specialises in a warm digital deconstruction of guitar noise
A panel exploring how to dismantle the master’s house — its material edifices and ideological architecture — and the construction of abolitionist futures in the present.
The production of moving image (film) by the mechanically, unfalteringly repetitive manipulation of mass-produced materials (film), in order to explore three different allegorical representations (films) of repetitive human actions and labour under capital.
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.
A performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
