Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
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.
Over 3 days Episode 8 celebrates all the unruly ways we escape attempts to constrain us, tear down the walls of normative culture and build joy in flight.
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?
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 conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
Glasgow. Low-end drone guitarage army in praise of the open chord.
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening?
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
A simple, gracefully bold set-up to allow Loïc to trace connections: of comments upon comments upon comments, of sounds next to sounds next to sounds.
A saxophone. Handheld fans. Shrill squeaks. Splutters, gargling. An incredible diversity of sounds, intensely focused by an inventive musician.
AVVA sees the internal feedback of Toshi’s no-input mixing desk is fed to Billy, and transformed into bright and variegated patters, striations and blooming colour, before being fed back to Toshi and manipulated on route to the PA.
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?
A conversation about the movement for prison abolition and refusing the logic of race and sex that underpins the criminalisation and mass incarceration of communities.