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 art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
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.
A recently reanimated Ascension, with mighty Leeds drum hero Paul Hession bringing a dense polyrhythmic torrent into play with Jaworzyn’s reinvigorated piercing guitar.
The reknowned artist Kjell Bjørgeengen works collaboratively with innovative musicians to make complex installations. Channels of flickering light are produced in response to and from sound.
Introducing and setting intentions for 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.
For day four of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will take up protocols for listening to the sound of freedom composed and facilitated by Fred Moten.
What is happening when systems of repression try to grasp communities’ ways of being, living or surviving, applying laws of sexuality, gender or race to cast them as criminal?
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
Pitching Fahey inspired, eastern-infused folk vibrations, sad elliptical drones and oracle chants into one kaleidoscopic sound.
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.
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.
