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.
While ‘Listening’ and ‘Talking’ might at first glance seem to imply one another we’re aiming for this theme to become more contradictory and messy as we add documentation. Two suggested starting points to explore this theme could be Ray Brassier & Thomas Metzinger discussing neuroscience and experience, Howard Slater talking about individual and collective practices in free jazz and the From Subjection to Subjection talk from Episode 6. In this theme, these paired ‘terms’ 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.
(Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows using the formula of morning radio as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behaviour and controlled empathy of systematic care.
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
Organised by Twiggy Pucci Garcon and Pony Zion, The Masters Ball focuses on the work of 50 individuals designated within the scene as ‘masters’ in their respective performance categories, which include Vogue, Runway, and Face.
A celebration of the release of four books written by members of, and focused on about the House and Ballroom scene.
Open community meeting to discuss some of the prevalent concerns impacting the ballroom community.
A historical narrative of the black and latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to its artistic practices.
The role of feelings in public life, (political) depression and creative survival.
The queer archiving of traumatic cultural memory from one of the leading voices working with queer archives.
Can we find ideas of queer anarchism, failure and low theory in popular culture?
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.