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 a moment of social exhaustion, we want to ask how we might care for each other differently. We Can’t Live Without Our Lives is a 5-day exploration of care as a form of struggle and resistance, with communities who embody it.
The first of two short film programmes featuring works that blur the boundaries between music and film from artists who cross and redefine those long held divisions. This programme focuses on the forebearers of filmic and musical innovation over the last 70 years.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
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.
A dance party love letter to our community, expressing the joy of relation in the abstract and through actual physical proximity.
Could they be one of the most ferocious live noise acts around, or a necessary and ludicrous parody of ferocious noise acts? Could they be both?
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 queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
Sarah Washington uses electronics and wind-up radios, running out of charge to repsond to the festivals’ Self Cancellation provocation.
Slowly evolving ultra-subtle harmonics and multi-tracked, otherworldly drones that only reveal their true power at high volume.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
