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.
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.
Inspired by the supernatural horror of H. P. Lovecraft, black metal and a sense of worry as to what constitutes an object, or a world.
Three short performances involving social exchange (jumpers, hats, glasses…) and singing (ballads)
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Emotional fantasies, towers of cakes, identity troubles, collapsed distance and time and Samuel R. Delany’s rarely seen 1971 film The Orchid.
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
A programme that looks at how sound and image can be treated as variants in a collection of ordered objects; at how to create meaning from the similar, and to notice difference.
Rhodri Davies plays two deconstructed harps. Lee Patterson examines the sonic properties of burning nuts.
A Festival supporting the struggle for Sex Workers’ Rights: share knowledge, discuss, dance and strategise!
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
