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?
US percussionist, poet, sound artist and instrument maker performing on self-made instruments constructed from industrial materials such as stainless steel, titanium, PVC plastics and various kinds of pipe.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
A three-day celebration surveying all manner of diverse musical activities, which at their core share a basic kinship: one of exploration and the discovery of musical expresssion.
Conceptual writer and practicing lawyer Vanessa Place performs and talks with Mark Sanders, author of the brilliant “Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid”
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
How do we gesture to the invisible, the trans or the obscure? A performative conversation between boychild and Fernando, a sharing of gestures, and a bodily back and forth between mathematician and dance artist.
“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
The Songspiels take on a mode of musical theatre developed by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill in the early twentieth century, presenting political and social concerns through the accessible and (often funny) form of song.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.
A poet, playwright and activist, Sanchez emerged as a seminal figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, writing in the name of black culture, civil rights and women’s liberation.
