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.
A series of reality dramas happening over the course of the weekend.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
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.
Individual experience separated by physical boundaries (of space, time or ability) suggested as communities of collective experience by (perhaps voyeuristic) artists.
Slowly evolving ultra-subtle harmonics and multi-tracked, otherworldly drones that only reveal their true power at high volume.
Sarah Washington uses electronics and wind-up radios, running out of charge to repsond to the festivals’ Self Cancellation provocation.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of light emerge, as the emulsion is scratched from the surface of the film. Simultaneously, out of the black silence, noise and audible scratches bloom into a bright drone.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
A conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
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.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
