Arika, an art organisation which has presented major projects with well-established institutions, has announced the full line-up for its next ‘Episode’, titled From The Rivers To The Seas. Promising five days of anti-colonial art, performance, film, and discussion, the programme will take place from Wednesday 11–Sunday 15 November at Tramway and will be streamed online, with the central aim of exploring ‘how we can— through the social and aesthetic registers of common life—collectively think with and from Palestine, on a planetary scale.’ 

The radical programme will include many contributors who will be appearing in Scotland for the first time, including Brazilian philosopher Leda Maria Martins, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Alshaer, Palestinian feminist, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Korean poet Don Mee Choi and decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès.

Also included in the programme is a suite of experimental films which have been restored an subtitled for the first time, including Yann Le Masson’s J’ai Huit Ans & Sucre Amer (pictured above); Jean-Michel Humeau’s Réunion 67; Jacqueline Meppiel’s Maloya pour la liberté; and Michel Khleifi’s Ma'loul Celebrates its Destruction. 

In music, Counterflow will be in collaboration with Arika for a music programme which includes Ejrad (Masa Nazzal & Hajar Ibrahim), Mazen Kerbaj, and Kamilya Jubran.

Barry Esson from Arika says: ‘For liberation, justice and revolution to be successful they must be planetary. Between every river and every sea, and beyond every border and state. At Arika we work to connect local and global struggles, and believe that social desires can become embodied aesthetically. Colonial violence is constantly recomposed as it adapts to different contexts. Each instance prototypes new mechanisms of extraction, but also insurgent forms of resistance, changing how past, present and future ones are understood. 

‘At Episode 12 we want to ask: How do we think with, and from, Palestine on a planetary scale? Can we connect different sites of anti-colonial resistance, without flattening them through analogy, equivalence or universalism? How can we learn in the back and forth between different colonial situations and the struggles of refusal that resist them? 

‘And what is the role of art in this? How do social and aesthetic registers of common life interact: through memory and re-membering; through mourning or testimony; through gesture, image, or translation? How do they help imagine belonging to land beyond the state or borders, and out with colonial ideas of time? 

‘We’re really excited to see how this programme develops in real time, with all the invited artists and participants, and audiences in Glasgow; our friends and collaborators at Tramway, Panel, Counterflows;  to see how a social space can develop in which together we can speculate, learn and share the joy of anti-colonial refusal.’

The announcement comes after a full week of programme reveals, including the Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival, all of which will take place across Scotland within the next few months. 

Arika Episode 12: From The Rivers To The Seas, Tramway, Glasgow, Wednesday 11–Sunday 15 November.

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