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.
Formed as a means to realise William Bennett’s goal of “a sound that could bludgeon an audience into submission”
This programme is a celebration of Charlemagne Palestine; passionate, extravagant, visceral. Including two sections from Ritual dans le Vide, an extension of his ‘running camera’ works of the 70’s and Pip Chodorov’s vibrant workout of a live version of Strumming Music.
‘Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations’ for piano, an impossible score that looks like a grapeshot musical stave, a text of barbed loathing and doubt – an anti-composition.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.
A series of reality dramas happening over the course of the weekend.
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
Cardboard boxes, metal guitar, critical homage, attempts to describe things you can’t describe. A one-man Grand Guignol school play.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
An audio and video investigation of gender cults, Catholicism, hauntings and nuns’ use of audio devices…
A crash-course in pre-figurative, radical, queer, anti-racist, anti-police, anti-prison, anti-deportation abolitionist politics and trans-resistance.
All ticket income goes directly to We Will Rise – a group of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and their allies who have come together to End Immigration Detention in the UK.
