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.
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.
A performed, open, public conversation about how we might think politics from the position of intuition, in which Denise and Valentina use un-reasonable tools to map out a hybrid poetical/ ethical reading of their own situations.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
We wanted to ask a bunch of the best high-energy-improvisers around; can musical form really taking shape via a group energy? Can individual concentration lead to a group consciousness?
Multiple images, glimpses of old films, abstract images in the midst of an electro-acoustic sound field of tape loops & analogue synthesizers
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
Ex Ganger guitarist’s solo performance for guitar and fx, featuring breathless processed guitar, complex in structure and melody.
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
A double bill of A (imageless) film of nothing but a sound recording and its transcription and a found film of news interviews about Malcolm X’s assasination, where the filmmaker decided to add nothing to it, except our attention.
A space to reflect on our own experiences with the police and explore more community and care-based ways of dealing with violence and difficulties in our lives.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
