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.
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
Wordless, reverb drenched voice, ghosted electronics, seething and ferocious electronic damage and Patty Waters style vocal mania.
Investigate film as language, via the language of film reduced to the basic units of film and language. A film as text in which each frame is a single word.
A sort of prayer and conference, a sort of scream and dialogue – a monologue and declaration at the time, addressing how we can build complicity with one another.
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
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 festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
How do communities practice being one another’s means, addressing their material problems facing them replicating the state’s violent logic of who is disposable.
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
