Arka Kinari- artivism at sea w Filastine and Nova

Straight from Sydney Festival, come find out what happens when a rogue galley of global artists and activists sail their 70-ton ship, Arka Kinari across the globe  to revive ancient trade-routes through contemporary exchange and discussion while sounding the alarm on the climate crisis.  

Fresh from performances on Sydney harbour for Sydney Festival, in Tassie for MOMA and Brisbane Festival. This is a fundraiser to support the onward journey of Arak Kinari that will be touring Indigenous communities across the Indonesian archipelago. 

Grey Filastine (Spain) and Nova Ruth (Indonesia) share a live documentary performance combining video, music and story to take you on a voyage from the seedy ports of Morocco to Mexico, visiting Venezuelan soldiers on a barren rock, previewing Panama’s disappearing islands, meeting Micronesian navigators preserving their ancient craft to presenting the Pacific’s bizarre nuclear testing legacy. 

 Arka, Latin for vessel, from the verb arcere, meaning “to hold off or defend” and Kinari, from Sanskrit – a half-human, half-bird musician, guardian of the tree of life will return the audience to humanity’s first global network - the sea with a cargo of cultural gifts. 

See it before it sets sail again.  

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE 

In a live documentary performance combining video, music and story, Nova Ruth & Grey Filastine share the voyage of Arka Kinari. Subversive, immersive and partially submerged, Arka Kinari is a 70-ton sailing ship transformed into a cultural platform to sound the alarm for the climate crisis.

Find out what happens when a rogue’s gallery of activists, makers and artists ton a terrible idea for the best of reasons. Everything you imagined about the wildness of the sea will be confirmed... and then some. International borders will be proven fictions, until they suddenly become the hardest of facts when the pandemic traps Arka Kinari stateless at sea for months with a broken engine and shrinking supplies. Along the way you’ll find out what happens behind the fences of seedy ports from Morocco to Mexico, be hosted by Venezuelan soldiers on a barren rock, perform for indigenous communities on Panama’s disappearing islands, witness the bizarre legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific, negotiate provisioning with heads of state, meet the Micronesian navigators preserving their ancient craft, be bashed by storms, scavenge supplies from shipwrecks, and be saved by a passing supertanker. You’ll also hear the challenges of touring an arts production aboard a ship in the world’s least charted waters, as we voyage the Indonesian archipelago from mega-cities to stilt villages, to be welcome and hosted by government ministers, Islamic scholars, quarantine teams in haz-mat suits, and transgender shamans.

• sixty minutes, followed by an optional Q&A

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Filastine & Nova are a multimedia duo working to undermine borders. Their music collides electronic beat production with dense layers of voice, concréte sounds, analogue synths and strings. Spin magazine calls it “bass music for crumbling urban futures,” and Pitchfork says “they sound less like `world’ music and more like music from another world.” Another world is exactly what they aim to create, using sound, video, design, and dance to express a radically different vision of the possible.
Filastine is the handle of Barcelona-based composer and video artist Grey Filastine. A former taxi driver from the United States, Filastine studied percussion with the coke-fueled carnival batucadas of Brazil and mystical brotherhoods in Morocco. In 1999 he founded the Infernal Noise Brigade marching band, putting these rhythms to use in a live soundtrack for the Seattle WTO revolt and the globalization protests that followed. DJ/Rupture discovered and released Filastine’s premiere album, Burn It! (2006), launching a decade of critically-acclaimed albums and world tours. One of those tours brought him to Jakarta where he met vocalist Nova Ruth, rhyming in Indonesia’s seminal rap group Twin Sista. Nova’s deep musical roots add much to Filastine’s sound; she was raised singing pentecostal spirituals with her priest grandfather, reciting Quran, and playing Javanese gamelan percussion. Beyond music, Nova’s continues her “day job” building networks among Southeast Asia’s video activists and hackers. Together they create unique and fearless interventions: an official mixtape for The Act of Killing documentary, a sound swarm at the Paris Climate Summit, a performance in the Calais Jungle migrant camp. Their latest effort, Abandon, is a video series profiling dances of emancipation from work, filmed
in locations from coal mines in Borneo to office cubicles in America. The songs of Abandon and a grip of other new tracks will come out this year on the duo’s first full album together, Drapetomania, colliding psychedelic trap, tropical post-folk and a punk ethos into a compelling audio thesis. Filastine & Nova are foremost performing artists, their live show is where sound, image, and ideas are embodied. They’ve toured the five continents, appearing at festivals such as Sonar (ES), Downtown Cairo
Arts (EG), Decibel (US), Les Vieilles Charrues (FR), Foreign Affairs (DE), Mona Foma (AU). For the new Drapetomania performance the duo are working with a guest dancer and cinematic multi-screen visuals to conjure an emergency exit from the anthropocene. Expect to find them anywhere, turning friction into beauty.