 
Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
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.
 
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
 
Stripping back the domesticated ‘meaning’ of (everyday, mundane, kitchen) tools to reveal “a lexicon of rage and frustration.” Plus an allegorical use of mundane, everyday things as an examination of how meaning is constructed in film.
 
Complex ways of understanding our complex times. Maths & Poetics. Gesture & Physics. Collectivist Struggle & Desire. 5 days of performances, discussions, screenings and study sessions.
 
With Taku we’ll carry out some simple proposals for doing almost nothing, for re-thinking sound with whatever comes to hand.
 
A delicate and detailed walk through the urban and rural landscape around Dundee; a poetic focus on the details found. A performance for 16mm projection and live amplified objects (maybe pine cones, maybe a coke bottle).
 
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.
 
A sort of prayer and conference, a sort of scream and dialogue – a monologue and declaration at the time, addressing how we can build complicity with one another.
 
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
 
A temporary archive and research space tracing the ways in which sound and audition move through everyday life.
 
Chip’s written some of the greatest of all Sci-Fi and Fantasy—page turning character driven diamond-hard novels and short stories: each a lens that refracts our real-life struggles and desires.
 
Final workshop exploring work, care and class. Does the ‘care industry’ summon forth its own class? Can this ‘affective class’, in their ability to care for others, militate against the carelessness of self-interest?
 
A film as a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark feminist novel Les Guérillères, in which a plural protagonist of militant feminists inhabit a fantastical, enigmatic and hallucinatory miasmatic space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.