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.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
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.
Usurper luddite twins’ disabled instruments play a game of pick-up-sticks with the deconstructed horn of a young Derby opponent.
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
There exist places in our towns and cities that are created not by design, but by circumstance. Shadowed Spaces was a tour of overlooked, bypassed and unconsidered nooks and crannies with 3 musicians.
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.
A speculative narrative film informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed.
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.
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?
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing by the Stones of Stenness, instead of the Ring of Brodgar, because of bad weather.
