Episodes

A key part of our programming, Episodes explore the interlinked nature of aesthetics and social organising, through public events, investigating interlinked themes and contradictions, which develop from one Episode to the next.Episodes are an attempt to contribute to sustaining, defending and sharing radical forms of sociality. They are annual(ish) events which bring together performance, investigation and collective assembly. In each we explore interlinked themes developing from one Episode to the next. In this way, we seek to contribute to a general awareness of the inseparable, intertwined nature of aesthetics and social life. Through Episodes our work at Arika attempts to place emphasis on lived experiences of struggle as a vital form of political knowledge. By studying the way in which struggle becomes embodied through artistic or aesthetic practices, we seek to amplify the simple conviction that revolutionary ideas need time, space and care to unfold.

Episodes can include dance, music or theatre performances, discussions, workshops, parties and clubs, community social events, meals, activist presentations, performed installations or film screenings.

Here’s a summary of the Themes each Episode has addressed so far:

Episode 1: A Film is a Statement (2012) focused on films made politically, films that show us or embody the learning process itself.

Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness (2012) was about negativity; about the limits of thought and experience, and what we might consider ‘ourselves’.

Episode 3: Copying Without Copying (2012) asked whether it is possible reanimate situations so as to better understand them.

Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2013) explored poetics and race: asking how communities test out freedom, even whilst it doesn’t yet exist.

Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight (2013) sought to learn with and from alternative queer kinship structures, and how aesthetics embody the desires and struggles found there.

Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way (2014) used notions of dance as a political navigation of bodily confinement.

Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives (2015) explored anti-psychiatric practices of care which challenge norms of disability, sanity and the Medical-Industrial Complex.

Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp (2016) celebrated abolition as a technology of queer and trans resistance.

Episode 9: Other Worlds Already Exist (2017) focused around science fiction, sexuality and pre-figurative world-making, investigating how we might navigate the present by telling stories that alter the future

Episode 10: A Means Without End (2019) investigated how the art and thought of collectivist desires, contemporary maths and the counterintuitive realities of particle physics can help us grow the capacity to be one another’s means without end.

We are currently in the research and development phase for Episode 11, emerging out of ongoing international and local work with our friends and allies.