
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.
This theme collates work/concepts that have been explored at a number of recent events. Some intial suggestions of where to start could be with one of boychild’s arresting lipsync performances, the live performative outcome of the No Total project or Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitzanos’s contribution to Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives that included song, film, poetry and audience participation. The idea behind this proposed theme is to offer a way to explore and navigate the archive. The paired ‘terms’ the theme is composed of are not synonyms nor are they binary oppositions but words that combine to (hopefully) produce un-rational anti-categories. The aim is to allow (encourage) the archive to be read in ways counter to normative or reductive categories. To allow things in the archive to appear in sometimes unlikely groupings and to resist essentialism.
Voguing, drag, clubbing, and the politics of communities making different performances of gender and sexuality visible.
When we look, how do we objectify the body; how can we reflect on our (self) image as a construction?
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
An audio and video investigation of gender cults, Catholicism, hauntings and nuns’ use of audio devices…
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene going on in Harlem had travelled downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
When one calls a strike, who hears the call, who attunes and listens to it? How to listen to the call of a strike? What prevents one from hearing this call or stops one from listening to it?
A performed reflection on Malin’s previous re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art from the French feminist and artist Gina Pane.