
Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
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.
Some suggestions of ways in to exploring this theme could be Hortense Spillers’ conversation with Denise Ferreria da Silva on fleshliness and bodiliness and the From Subjection to Subjection discussion with Reina Gossett, Charlene Sinclair and Saidiya Hartman or Mujeres Creando throwing eggs in their Recipes to Change Society provocation.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Is there a link between the ways we’re caged and exiled by the prison-industrial complex and the ways people’s bodies are violently categorised and segregated by race, class, gender or ability?
In rethinking the body, the law, the state, gender, race, violence, care and empathy, how we might give humanness a different future?
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
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.
A performed filmic conversation on queer and black world making.
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.
A socio-poetic reading on wayward communities – The wayward create upheavals, incite tumult. They come and go as they please; they are fugitive; they are in open rebellion against society.
A historical narrative of the black and latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to its artistic practices.
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?
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.
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?