Chosen Kin: Making Our Loyalties
Mai’a Williams Miss Major Claricia Revlon
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
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.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
An immersive environment where sound is looped through oscillators, radio, guitar pick-ups and video amps to create dense strobing images and colours
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
Edinburgh. Cask-strength electrohypnol and shroom damaged folk croonings by Lapsed Electronics empire builder.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Politicised fan-fiction chronicling working class gay urban space and fantasy.
A chorister attempting to sing Vivaldi, with live accompaniment, while trampolining for 20 minutes.
Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything.
UK conceptual/ drone/ noise artist, who is seriously posing what might seem to be unanswerable questions of music.
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?