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.
4 days of performances, discussions, workshops, screenings with mutant dancers, prison abolitionist poets, transfeminist revolutionaries, haunted noise, science fiction, sex worker resistance, crip erotics, radical pornography and militant fiction.
In Our Hands is a ten week programme of workshops facilitated by Lisa Fannen, Omikemi and Clay. The sessions explore radical approaches to health and collective care in the context of movement for liberation and social justice.
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.
IN OUR LIFETIME, is an anti-imperialist resource, edited by Hussein Mitha, produced by Arika for Episode 11, featuring poetry, essays, questions, prompts, letters and works of anti-colonial imaginary.
A solo improvisation using just the situation of the concert: a space, a PA, Mattin’s own thoughts, you, the audience.
A conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
Three (thankfully short) chats wherein we try and get at what’s eating us with regards to experimental music, and what we think might be worth salvaging.
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
An improvisation that may or may not involve (typical) improvisation.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
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.
The films in the programme take the essential and fundamental building blocks of cinema (combining sound and image through time) screw about with them, interrogate them and cast them anew.
