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.
What is happening when systems of repression try to grasp communities’ ways of being, living or surviving, applying laws of sexuality, gender or race to cast them as criminal?
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
How do we sense entanglement? Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter?
The ongoing development of [b]reach, an abolitionist black queer retelling of Marge Piercy’s incredible feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
A double bill of Morgan Fisher films that ask what can be achieved by a simple structural method of commenting on scraps of 35mm film, re-shot on 16mm film and what happens to meaning (if anything) when ‘insert shots’ are relieved of their original duty of providing crucial plot development for a variety of other movies?
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
What to do about a telethon other than fuck it up? Poet, tarotist, artist, and librarian Cyrée Jarelle Johnson returns to IWBWYE to read the 1980s and ’90s for what those decades were: practice for now.
Free jazz pianist John Blum with an everywhere-at-once presence in duo with Jackson Krall, incendiary free jazz drummer and sound sculptor
A slowed down single tracking shot along a corridor as workers at the Bath Iron Works, (Maine, USA) take their lunch break.
