Wadada Leo Smith & John Tilbury
John Tilbury Wadada Leo Smith
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
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 might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Save the dates for Episode 12.
Wednesday 11 – Sunday 15 November 2026
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.
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.
Come for the crip ingenuity; stay for the smooth feels of what it is to be each other’s everything.
60 minutes of hard ass minimal film, projected onto a weather balloon and accompanied by the inspired poetic rant of a visionary Frenchman.
Julius’ “small music” features simple snatches of found sound, played back through small speakers, often set in bowls of pigment and dirt which shimmies in the vibrations.
An assembly to try and provide some experiential and theoretical resources for the renewal of a certain affective, extra-political sociality, in the face of one of our great adversaries; the forces of colonial, imperial, genocidal denial.
John Butcher plays and manipulates a feeding back saxophone. Benedict Drew on electronics, broken cables and standing waves.
Light Music is a dizzying celebration of the pivotal nature of sound in film; a direct and powerful transcription of film as sound.
A concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.