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.
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
I wanna be with you everywhere was a gathering of, by, and for disabled artists and writers and anyone who wanted to get with us for a series of crip meet-ups, performances, readings and other social spaces of surplus, abundance and joy.
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Haunted by the archive of the New Cross Fire, Jay Bernard presents a film and poetry reading that undertakes a queer exploration of black British history, reconstructed from archives and apparent debris.
Duo performance by two great French musique concrète improvisers using feedback, contact mics, tape, an old Revox tape machine, a vintage synth…
Includes: a polish counting lesson, around NYC with D A Pennebaker, a portrait of a tower block, a man with a spade, at home with KYTN regular Guy Sherwin, a cinematic Blair Witchish cut-up and a song for some swings.
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.
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.
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
A collaborative social justice project that uses art, activism and awareness to combat the systemic oppression facing young, trans, queer & gender nonconforming people of colour.
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.
