Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
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.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Acoustic turntable, engines, trumpet and accordion joined by Bassist Magarida Garcia: build long-form quietly detailed pieces that clatter and rumble, that expand and contract with the tension and release of deeply held breath.
Transfeminist and revolutionary poetry, voice and timbral abstraction: a sounding and spatialising of reparative sonic and somatic practices that can speak back to violent histories of expropriation and ecocide.
What’s the best way to spend time with a musician when they visit a city to perform? And when the musician in question has a great deal to say, what sort of concert do you organise to do justice to that?
Noise music for the eyes: projectors turned into instruments, B&W film loops into a thrumming riot of colour, motion and sound.
Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger for 4 pianos performed by Joe Kubera, Kate Thompson, David Murray, Alan Fearon and Simon Passmore.
Sax/Drums duo of raucous, pealing noise, and cries of beguiling lyricism, whispered sax phrases float in a timbral cloud of bowed metal and rumbling toms.
A Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by improviser yodeller, composer Phil Minton.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
A conversation of intergenerational trans-resistance and anti-racist fierceness between two of the most inspiring public speakers we know.
How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
What is happening when systems of repression try to grasp communities’ ways of being, living or surviving, applying laws of sexuality, gender or race to cast them as criminal?