A Signature of the Room
Jean-Luc Guionnet Taku Unami
Simple maths and stringent scored instructions move precise frequencies and clicks to create a dense, fluctuating environment of standing waves and physical sound.
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.
Simple maths and stringent scored instructions move precise frequencies and clicks to create a dense, fluctuating environment of standing waves and physical sound.
Birthed from the collective stagger in global consciousness of the late 50’s and 60’s, this programme celebrates epochal, groundbreaking films that all address sound in their own way and that have opened pathways to experimentation.
A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled between the seen and the heard; a road trip played over and over from different perspectives.
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Solo performance by Diamanda Galás one of the great artists of the last forty years. Hers is an emotional expressionism of demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, glottal clicks and diabolical growls.
Three panels offering opportunities to discuss how to build stronger alliances between the sex workers’ rights, migrants rights and reproductive justice movements and how to face, together, an increasingly punitive and reactionary system.
Three speakers play back pre-recorded sounds, Marc listens and responds: “What is played is the imperfect witness of what I listen to (or maybe better, how I listen).”
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.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?