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.
A programme that looks at how sound and image can be treated as variants in a collection of ordered objects; at how to create meaning from the similar, and to notice difference.
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 programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
A joyful conversation discussing disability, gender transition and care labour as expressions of virtuosic and innovative skills that make care – good care – possible.
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?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
How do communities formed under the duress of violent othering and the joy of solidarity – such as ballroom culture, Black diasporas, Zapatistas – reform bonds of kinship?
Polly Shang Kuan Band coven leader and Sick Head’s psychedelic shaman Nackt Insecten make hex ritual to birth a new astral being….. Smack Insecten.
Joe Colley specialises in hotwired sound constructions full of ominous electronic disturbances and caustic, noxious drones. For KYTN, Joe created a situation of controlled chaos with 50 light sensitive oscillators placed in a field of candles.
NVA asked Arika to curate and programme the sound aspects of their 2007 Half-Life production in Kilmartin Glen. Arika worked with Toshiya Tsunoda, Lee Patterson, Rhodri Davies and Angharad Davies.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
In 2008 we toured our Kill Your Timid Notion festival of experimental sound and image to London, Bristol and Glasgow, bringing audiences a taste of the previous 5 festival editions.
