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.
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.
Instead of the one-way monologue of normal performance, what would be the result of an actual collective dialogue? Where would it go?
The struggle for sex workers’ rights and how we can understand it in the continuum of care work and other forms of invisibilised and precarious work.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.
Michael Colligan pressing white hot metal into dry ice, causing the metal to sing and scream.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
A concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”
Offering a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost – and for ourselves. Expect fire and a little bit of smoke. Concluding with a D/deaf centered social space with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL.
Slapstick comedy, monologue, and a kind of live sculpture transformed through video, props, musical instruments and make-up.
Guitar and voice. Keening, droning and mourning. Be ready to release and bring your dis-ease.
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?