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.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
A double bill of Morgan Fisher films that ask what can be achieved by a simple structural method of commenting on scraps of 35mm film, re-shot on 16mm film and what happens to meaning (if anything) when ‘insert shots’ are relieved of their original duty of providing crucial plot development for a variety of other movies?
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Goodwin’s writing emanates from the social life of poetry, from a condition of entanglement before historically racially-specific forms of representation. Another word for this emanation is breath.
Discussion with David Keenan: an author, critic and musician based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is best known for the reviews and features he has contributed to The Wire.
Sparse and miniature free thought workouts involving guitar, vocals and tuba.
A programme of discontinuity between narration, text and image. Including Manual Saiz’s employment of John Malkovich’s Spanish dubbing double and Peter Rose’s absurdly hilarious concrete poetry subtitling chaos.
Haunted by the archive of the New Cross Fire, Jay Bernard presents a film and poetry reading that undertakes a queer exploration of black British history, reconstructed from archives and apparent debris.
“I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.”
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?
Is it possible to dance our way out of the hardened stances and identity prisons we are locked in?
A full-blooded, emotional attempt to reinvigorate improvisation from a musically inclined philosopher and two philosophically inclined improvisers.
