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.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
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.
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.
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening?
Underlying radical transfeminism, as an urgent critique of binary essentialism and fixed identities, is the call for a new kind of thinking that can move between and integrate the truths of all lives in their transformations.
Work for cello, percussion, contra bassoon and cherbulum commissioned for Instal in collaboration with Paragon
Social and party with all proceeds going to the Unity Centre, featuring DJ SETS with Dj@Christelle, DJ D-Harsh, Nena Etza & Moor Mother.
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
