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.
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.
A kind of audience activating, structured film guessing game in the manipulation of time, sound and image. “At 11:15, weiners. At 21:05, pornography. At 23:30, a duet. Watch the Clock.”
Radical transfeminism aims to hold the space for finding relations between the ruins of the everyday. Emerging from the debris, spaces for politics find form as poetics to carry understandings, actions and be/longings.
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.
Quasi-theatrical multiple-projector pieces play with the relationship between performers, art and audiences.
A conversation between influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity, asking: what if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
These simple, one-take videos, relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East via the most basic of means (a hotel room, a camcorder, John’s personal thoughts, concerns and convictions).
The production of moving image (film) by the mechanically, unfalteringly repetitive manipulation of mass-produced materials (film), in order to explore three different allegorical representations (films) of repetitive human actions and labour under capital.
Blissed-out sun-dappled drone ragas of the highest order, with a metal-tinged signature sound of plucked and bowed strings.
Underlying radical transfeminism, as an urgent critique of binary essentialism and fixed identities, is the call for a new kind of thinking that can move between and integrate the truths of all lives in their transformations.
A meditation on how all of us perform — sometimes reinforcing, sometimes subverting — the shifting categories of gender, sexuality and race.
