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.
Join activists, academics and artists as they reflect on abolitionist praxis and thought, exploring covergences with gender, poetry, technology, performance, speculation, aesthetics, film and culture. This series of events commemorates Black August and is for anyone who wishes to answer the abolitionist call to action and thought.
A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled between the seen and the heard; a road trip played over and over from different perspectives.
A somehow hyper-modern, ancient and folkloric lip-synced, made-up, fashioned performance.
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 kind of performed installation of searing noise and silence, where we’re not sure who the performer is, when it starts or ends or even who it’s for.
A dance party love letter to our community, expressing the joy of relation in the abstract and through actual physical proximity.
An excavation of the 1805 Lock Hospital in Glasgow. Its official function was to support ‘unfortunate females with venereal disease’, but really what happened was that women and girls were marched in, experimented on, and often never released.
An immersive environment where sound is looped through oscillators, radio, guitar pick-ups and video amps to create dense strobing images and colours
Multiple images, glimpses of old films, abstract images in the midst of an electro-acoustic sound field of tape loops & analogue synthesizers
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
Polly Shang Kuan Band coven leader and Sick Head’s psychedelic shaman Nackt Insecten make hex ritual to birth a new astral being….. Smack Insecten.
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
