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.
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.
What kind of listening and acknowledging do we offer each other? What is it to listen to an ‘elsewhere’, and do we ever do anything else when we listen to music?
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
A film installation as both allegory and investigation of The Rockridge Institute and their research into ‘framing’ and the use of metaphor within political discourse.
Sadia Shirazi & Mezna Qato will discuss a series of scores that explore the texture and landscape of exile, resistance, and Muslim sociality. These instructional scores trouble the idea that art and activism are untouched by faith and faith is untouched by art and activism.
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.
Ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music: like “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Edinburgh. Beer and smoke befuddled drone/ deadly efforts by Pjorn72 kingpin.
Seven women recite monologues composed from texts from the vibrant years of the Weimar Republic. A kind of cultural echo: an experience of histories brought to the present.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
