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 film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
Heat-mapped bodies, found porn films, Korean psyche-folk, creepy police intrusion and self-defence.
A double bill of A (imageless) film of nothing but a sound recording and its transcription and a found film of news interviews about Malcolm X’s assasination, where the filmmaker decided to add nothing to it, except our attention.
A performed self-cancelling discussion, with artists from the festival, invited speakers and local artists talking at once, over each other, or straining to be heard over the din.
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
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.
One of the great experimental films. A 60 minute, three part riddle that maybe approximates our intellectual development by moving from imageless words to the recognition of silent images and the learning of simple tasks and finally a serenity and acceptance of death.
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.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
