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 changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.
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?
How does this practice, that simultaneously resists and honours the distinctions between these genres, materials and senses, determine the inhabitation of another: a convergence of aesthetic and social experimentation?
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a large multi chambered industrial ice house.
Arika is working in partnership with Decriminalised Futures on a multi year collaboration featuring multiple creative projects exploring sex worker lives, experiences and movement struggles.
A confrontational and somehow shamanic stance; introspective silences shattered by savage jabs at the strings, whirlwind strums dying into spartan chords
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.
The 2006 INSTAL festival saw a broad selection of artists that included Blood Stereo and Ludo Mich, Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan, Keiji Haino and Tony Conrad and a specially created performance by Maryanne Amacher.
A performance for dry ice and four specially constructed steel tables, each one heated by a single candle until searingly hot.
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.
AMM have undoubtedly been among the most important contributors to the UK free improv scene for nearly 40 years and we are extremely proud to be able to be working with such distinguished musicians who still rarely play live in the UK.
