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.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
Light Music is a dizzying celebration of the pivotal nature of sound in film; a direct and powerful transcription of film as sound.
Whether drawing their own fractured, abstract narrative, or re-contextualising, chewing up and spitting out someone else’s, each of the films here take a dramatic arc as their starting point and throw it to the wind.
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.
Julius’ “small music” features simple snatches of found sound, played back through small speakers, often set in bowls of pigment and dirt which shimmies in the vibrations.
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 performance bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience and collective action from the great multi-instrumentalist and member of the AACM.
A testimony to poverty from Chris’s own experiences, and an invitation to engage with an all too typical situation and context through a kind of imaginary listening.
A film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
The reknowned artist Kjell Bjørgeengen works collaboratively with innovative musicians to make complex installations. Channels of flickering light are produced in response to and from sound.
Thinking against the monoculturalism of Western thought—of faith, affection, sexuality and gender—which completely lacks any utility to, or descriptive value of Indigenous worldviews.
Simon Morris is joined by Nick Thurston as they attempt to read aloud whilst peddling on exercise bikes.
