
Episode 1: A Film is a Statement
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
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.
Every aspect of every film is always about more than just film. Or, as Godard said: a tracking shot is a moral issue. A cross between a festival, magazine and discussion about experimental artists’ films.
A performed film lecture exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
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.
Equal parts spectacle, installation and performance, his set for us is a specially developed work, ‘turning’, which features an orchestra of multiple turntables, 4 projections and a collection of old, and, quite probably, misfiring analogue kit.
Three different performances variously featuring: Fritz Welch, loud drums, guitar, local collaborators, paper, memories, Roland Barthes, string quartets
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
Usurper luddite twins’ disabled instruments play a game of pick-up-sticks with the deconstructed horn of a young Derby opponent.
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 poetic multi-screen performance about “the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence”. About time and change.
Thinking against the monoculturalism of Western thought—of faith, affection, sexuality and gender—which completely lacks any utility to, or descriptive value of Indigenous worldviews.
Social and party with all proceeds going to the Unity Centre, featuring DJ SETS with Dj@Christelle, DJ D-Harsh, Nena Etza & Moor Mother.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.