In Our Hands 2025
In Our Hands is a nine week programme of workshops exploring radical approaches to health and collective care in the movement for liberation and social justice.
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 Our Hands is a nine week programme of workshops exploring radical approaches to health and collective care in the movement for liberation and social justice.
Open-ended, paradoxical and performed investigations into: misunderstanding, language games, form saturated with sense, and consecutive matters…
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.
Sax/Drums duo of raucous, pealing noise, and cries of beguiling lyricism, whispered sax phrases float in a timbral cloud of bowed metal and rumbling toms.
A confrontational and somehow shamanic stance; introspective silences shattered by savage jabs at the strings, whirlwind strums dying into spartan chords
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.
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening?
When we look, how do we objectify the body; how can we reflect on our (self) image as a construction?
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?
Adamantly analogue, inspiring and frequently chaotic in performance, Metamkine draw no distinction between image and sound; during their intuitively improvised performances music and images are created simultaneously and equitably.
Can we find ideas of queer anarchism, failure and low theory in popular culture?
A historical narrative of the black and latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to its artistic practices.