
Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight
Voguing, drag, clubbing, and the politics of communities making different performances of gender and sexuality visible.
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.
With these theme we want to set work that doesn’t seem to fit close to or in any category at all alongside work that deals explicitly with category and practices of categorising, or escaping category. A couple of suggestions for starting to investigate this theme could be Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio’s performed film lecture about Caribbean cinema and Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman disucssing what it might mean to be fugitive.
Voguing, drag, clubbing, and the politics of communities making different performances of gender and sexuality visible.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
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.
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
A conversation between Philip and Moten: how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?
Inspired by the supernatural horror of H. P. Lovecraft, black metal and a sense of worry as to what constitutes an object, or a world.
Complexly interacting colossal drones by the creator of some of the most legendary yet least heard music of the 70’s.