Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
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?
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?
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
The most sophisticated synthetic music around: timbrally otherwise body music as sonified fictions and auditive sociograms.
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
Solo performance by Diamanda Galás one of the great artists of the last forty years. Hers is an emotional expressionism of demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, glottal clicks and diabolical growls.
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
A stroboscopic and intense sensory overload of flashing abstract forms, cut to ribbons by modified projectors.
A landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.
Argument is a provocative, multi-layered film essay, a trenchant analysis of the media and remains a critically relevant and critically inflammatory tract.
Ian and Gil will host a discussion on the Argument project’s social and political commentaries, and with you try and maybe think through whether and how they might still have some currency today: what’s changed and what’s stayed the same?
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?