Episode 1: A Film is a Statement
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
Solo by Jean-Philippe Gross, a French electro-acoustic improviser, working with mixing board, cheap mics, small speakers and an analog synth, built around a honed interest in feedback.
Vajra are a Japanese psychedelic rock supergroup, hewn from the collective consciousness of Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, folk radical Kan Mikami and percussionist Toshiaki Ishitsuka.
Equal parts spectacle, installation and performance, his set for us is a specially developed work, ‘turning’, which features an orchestra of multiple turntables, 4 projections and a collection of old, and, quite probably, misfiring analogue kit.
A poetic multi-screen performance about “the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence”. About time and change.
Pitching Fahey inspired, eastern-infused folk vibrations, sad elliptical drones and oracle chants into one kaleidoscopic sound.
Poetry of raw fearless truth and the realest crip insight fully embedded in absolute lyrical lounge.
Nothing if not repetitive, film is founded on the incremental succession of minute difference. But how does repetition of the same play out, and is it a tool to comment on the standardising repetition of the mass media?
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
Durational group-mind drone and clatter: bamboo, electronics, the contents of your local ironmongers bin. A 3-hour set from this legendary Japanese improvisation group.
Juliana’s performances chart the dissonant space and discrepancy between the presumed fixed norms of social life and the fluid lived experience those norms don’t allow for.
A performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.