
Episode 1: A Film is a Statement
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
One of the most startling cinematic debuts on record, The Flicker is more a hallucination than a film, an out of body experience and riotous celebration of visual harmonics frequencies. An experiment in perception, come with your mind and eyes open.
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?
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
Pitching Fahey inspired, eastern-infused folk vibrations, sad elliptical drones and oracle chants into one kaleidoscopic sound.
Glasgow. Power electronic klutz behaviour by Kovorox sound head-honcho. Bruised bodies and broken microphones.
Joan La Barbara presents works exploring the colour spectrum of a single pitch resonating in her skull, an evocation of bird song and circular singing.
A historical narrative of the black and latino/a transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay House and Ballroom Scene in relation to its artistic practices.
Lo-fidelity sheets of parinirvanic mangled tone get driven into oblivion by two longstanding gurus of the Northern England primitivist noise.
Minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.
Out of a dark haze, shafts of light emerge, as the emulsion is scratched from the surface of the film. Simultaneously, out of the black silence, noise and audible scratches bloom into a bright drone.