Bleu Shut
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
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.
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
How do we sense entanglement? Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter?
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.
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Elizabeth’s writing pulls apart toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify it; working towards an alternative distribution of powers, so that ways of being otherwise can endure.
A speculative narrative film informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed.
A three-day celebration surveying all manner of diverse musical activities, which at their core share a basic kinship: one of exploration and the discovery of musical expresssion.
Guitar solo where inscrutable, minute electric sounds are excavated by palms that smother and strangle, that wring sound from the fretboard, from behind the bridge.
Individual experience separated by physical boundaries (of space, time or ability) suggested as communities of collective experience by (perhaps voyeuristic) artists.
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
Akio Suzuki and John Butcher performing in a remote sea cave near Durness.
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.