
Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
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?
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.
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 programme of discontinuity between narration, text and image. Including Manual Saiz’s employment of John Malkovich’s Spanish dubbing double and Peter Rose’s absurdly hilarious concrete poetry subtitling chaos.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…).
An assembly to try and provide some experiential and theoretical resources for the renewal of a certain affective, extra-political sociality, in the face of one of our great adversaries; the forces of colonial, imperial, genocidal denial.
Jacobs’ pulsing and abstract 3D Nervous Magic Lantern performance grounded by Eric La Casa’s manipulated recordings of everyday locations.
Equal parts spectacle, installation and performance, his set for us is a specially developed work, ‘turning’, which features an orchestra of multiple turntables, 4 projections and a collection of old, and, quite probably, misfiring analogue kit.
A black hole of dense heaviosity, full of slow motion riffage, tectonic pummel and massive planet destroying rock.
Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger for 4 pianos performed by Joe Kubera, Kate Thompson, David Murray, Alan Fearon and Simon Passmore.
Summing up of the investigations with a reflection on what has been done that week and what could be done the next.
An contradictory guitarist, he’s equally at home in slow, halting acoustic improvisation or piercing minimal examinations of electric guitar.
Tormented and drawn-out high-pitched yelps and drones, all interleaved with periods of torpid silence.