Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
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.
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
“Mackey composes realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.” — New York Times. “Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism have reinvented modernism for our time.”— LitHub
A sound of buzzing and flickering metallic drones, glottal stops and guttural growls, and also an explosiveness and purity of sound that reminds you as much of Bill Dixon as anyone else.
Guy Sherwin gives a kind of annotated, chat through his optical sound films
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
Birthed from the collective stagger in global consciousness of the late 50’s and 60’s, this programme celebrates epochal, groundbreaking films that all address sound in their own way and that have opened pathways to experimentation.
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
Open community meeting to discuss some of the prevalent concerns impacting the ballroom community.
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?
A chorister attempting to sing Vivaldi, with live accompaniment, while trampolining for 20 minutes.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?