Here the various incarnations of nihilist thinking that popped up from time to time through the history of Arika events can be explored in the context of work that deals with the body, abjection and performance. Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness took the ideas of Abjection and Nihility to heart and most of the events had some relationship with this theme. Some highlights: Junko's intense vocal performance, Taku Unami's absurdist cardboard box theatre piece and Mattin and Tim Goldie's attempt to push noise music beyond it's limits.

We've conceived of these paired ‘terms’ to help you explore the archive, but they are not synonyms nor are they binary oppositions but words that combine to (hopefully) produce un-rational anti-categories. The aim is to allow (encourage) the archive to be read in ways counter to normative or reductive categories. To allow things in the archive to appear in sometimes unlikely groupings and to resist essentialism.