Fred Moten – Chat
Fred Moten
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.
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.
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.
A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…).
A dense, hard, immersive, chaotic spatial performance in sound: a momentary gap in consciousness, free of order or decision.
For day one of Ultra-red’s project, the investigation will take up protocols for listening to the sound of freedom composed and facilitated by George E. Lewis.
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?
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
A series of events organised by the Vogue’ology collective from the House Ballroom community in New York grounded in the scenes history of autonomous, self-organised struggle and a shared investment in collective art practices and how those intersect with the multiple and often divergent struggles for freedom.
MICRO 1 – Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a light bundle. Keep the microphone live for another 5 minutes. T. Kosugi – (1961)
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Brother and sister stumble over the early morning horizon in a spectral haze of emotionally devastating lunar vocals and oblique, lithium-soaked folk.
With a signature spartan sound and long term preoccupation in structural tactics (subtle shifts in density, drawn out stasis) Polwechsel blur the boundaries between individual instruments.
Could cruising and random public sex be the basis of an ethically organised society? A discussion with Jackie Wang, Samuel R. Delany and Huw Lemmey.