Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Tramway 18 - 21 April)
Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight (Tramway 23 – 26 May & Stereo club night 24 May)
Arika’s ‘Expanded Festival’ of international film, live art, music and discussion premieres across Glasgow from the creators of INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion.
Episodes 4 & 5 are a continuation of 2012’s series A Film is a Statement, A Special Form of Darkness and Copying Without Copying. These new Episodes also build on Arika’s work at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Arika were the first ever UK contributors to the biennial and presented its first ever survey of sound.
Arika, the organisation behind two of the UK’s most prestigious experimental music and film events, INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion, return in 2013 with a second ‘expanded festival’. Taking place over two weekend-long Episodes spread across nine weeks, Arika will be bringing some of the world’s most renowned jazz musicians, preeminent poets and writers of African-American literary culture and interrogative performance artists into a creatively laidback dialogue with audiences, artists, activists, jazz lovers and the just plain curious.
“Arika are at the forefront of experientially rich, aesthetically demanding, and philosophically provoking curatorial practice. They appear to be an equal collaborator, challenging both their audiences and participating artists to bring their most potent work into view. They are doing the finest and most original curatorial work around...” Jay Sanders Co-Curator, 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
EPISODE 5: Hidden in Plain Sight
Like Episode 4, Episode 5 will be an exploration of some of the aesthetic practices that have been produced in fugitive spaces of freedom. Where Episode 4 explored the performance of freedom and blackness, this episode investigates the languages, gestures or habits by which different performances of gender or sexuality are socially enacted and performed. Whether that’s: voguing and the House|Ballroom scene, (trans-temporal) drag, lip syncing, public feelings, queer film, trauma, feeling bad, deep / queer house music and clubbing, low theory...
With: Vjuan Allure, Antonia Baehr, Cecilia Bengolea, Boychild, Pauline Boudry, François Chaignaud, Ann Cvetkovich, DJ Sprinkles, Marlene Freitas, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Emma Hedditch, Renate Lorenz, Fred Moten, Jimmy Robert, Terre Thaemlitz, Vogue’ology.
About Arika
Arika were formed in 2001 and have brought audiences in Scotland and the UK festivals of experimental and underground music, sound, film, art and ideas including the INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion festivals as well as tours like Resonant Spaces and Shadowed Spaces.
“New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” Amiri Baraka.
The work of two of the most important and exciting African American poets and writers, Amiri Baraka and Fred Moten, frames the festival. Amiri was the founder of the Black Arts Movement; he is America’s great radicalised poet, transcribing the tragic as political despair - radicalism set to work. To close the first half of our extended festival, on Sunday, Amiri will enter into a . Grimes was central in defining the bass sound of free jazz on monumental recordings and performances with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylo.
Other highlights across the weekend include:
Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser and educator, Wadada is one of the great figures in jazz, and the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) a musician-led institution that seeks the creative and representational control of its music and education. His music, grounded in a historical poetics, suggests what can be done as racism, poverty and justice intersect; bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience, collective action, a thousand acts: “None of these pieces are meant simply to be listened to.”
John Tilbury: Tilbury is the great avant-garde pianist of our time. We continue to be deeply affected by his thinking on music, politics and ideology: “There is no such thing as an artistic conscience which is not governed by world outlook…the content of a piece of music is not something mysterious, unattainable or elusive. On the contrary, creative listening, that is, listening to music that involves the mind as well as the ears and heart, can attain a measure of understanding of what a composer is saying about the world.”
Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio presents Ni ‘mamita’ Ni ‘mulatita’. A performed film lecture; maybe a little melodramatic, maybe danced, maybe not, but either way exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves (e.g.: the prevalance of brown/ blackface, the mammy and the mulata stereotype) through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.
Daniel Carter & William Parker: Is the music of exceptional jazz saxophonist Daniel Carter an improvisation of his, free associationist, non-impositional anarchism? When William Parker, the great jazz bassist of our time, says: "it is the role of the artist to incite political, social, and spiritual revolution, to awaken us from our sleep and never let us forget our obligations as human beings…" what’s he getting at? And: what might their collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
M. NourbeSe Philip presents Zong! "A brash, unsettling book, Zong! wants to chant or shout history down, shut history up… Fretful, possessed, obsessed, upset, curse and homeopathy, both, it visits a breathtaking run of glossolalic scat upon historical trauma." Nathaniel Mackay. Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience? And how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?
Both Episodes are designed to be informed but informal. Whilst each has a distinct, yet related, set of concerns at its core, the artists and events involved constantly query not only the intersections of, and the tensions between, music, poetry, performance and theory but also those between gender, sexuality and race. Our Episodes are intended as a kind of convivial, exploratory cross between a salon, festival and live magazine; maybe a kind of concentrated space in which ideas about art and its social use can be investigated through intense performances and thought-provoking discussions with leading international artists and thinkers, and hopefully with the people in Glasgow who might have the most to say in return.
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