Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
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.
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
The Truth and Lies book project emerges as part of a rising tide of sex worker art and organised struggle to end criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work.
‘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.
A panel exploring how to dismantle the master’s house — its material edifices and ideological architecture — and the construction of abolitionist futures in the present.
A stroboscopic and intense sensory overload of flashing abstract forms, cut to ribbons by modified projectors.
Copying without Copying is 3 evenings of events that are about what happens when we speak, or when we hear someone speak on our behalf, when we share a collective moment of hearing and maybe understanding.
An improvised film about our worlds at the brink, on the edge, in front of a crisis. To stand on the side of life, by seeing the resistance to genocide in Palestine as a turning point to overcome.
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
Los Glissandinos work with clarinet and sine tones beating and thrumming in your middle ear, all beautifully paced and serene, but with just enough steely menace broiling under the surface to keep you on edge.
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.
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
A landmark film on black life – a poetic filmic constellation of meditations, fragments and interviews on what it means to be black in America in the 21st century, from one of its great cinematographers.