Standing in the Flesh
Hortense J. Spillers
In rethinking the body, the law, the state, gender, race, violence, care and empathy, how we might give humanness a different future?
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.
In rethinking the body, the law, the state, gender, race, violence, care and empathy, how we might give humanness a different future?
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.
IN OUR LIFETIME, is an anti-imperialist resource, edited by Hussein Mitha, produced by Arika for Episode 11, featuring poetry, essays, questions, prompts, letters and works of anti-colonial imaginary.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
A Study Session focused on the thinking of Ailton Krenak – one of the great leaders of the Brazilian indigenous movement – led by curators and artists Amilcar Packer Arissana Pataxó.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
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.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
Light Music is a dizzying celebration of the pivotal nature of sound in film; a direct and powerful transcription of film as sound.
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.