It’s Sorta Like a Big Hug
Constantina Zavitsanos Park McArthur
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
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 can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
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?
Laser beam sine tones used to draw delicate, abstract patterns by vibrating charcoal, placed atop of a great strip of paper running through the gallery; beautiful, fragile sound-created autonomous drawing.
Taking a scalpel to the relationship between performer and audience: cutting something out to see what’s left, a drastic subtraction and shift of emphasis.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Reading their letters to each other, and chatting about prefigurative politics as the practice of relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss; of building worlds and living in them anyway.
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.
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
A party and fundraiser to support Sex Workers’ struggles and LGBT Unity with music and performances from the sex workers’ community and allies, plus DJ’s and dancing.
60 cycle hums, jagged static cracklings, and clipped electron pinpricks, mutating them into sublime, post-techno grooves