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For the past nine years we’ve watched Alejandra Ghersi, better known as Arca, carve a blazing path through the zeitgeist–a shapeshifting celestial body, streaking across the cultural firmament. Every time we laid eyes on her she’d taken on some new form–noise musician, diva, philosopher, fashion plate, party girl, technologist. Every time it seemed like we had a grip on her she slipped right past our expectations, protean and elusive.

That liquid nature has allowed Arca’s talents to thrive in unexpected places. Beyond creating a dense and varied body of musical work, she’s for Björk, Kanye, and FKA twigs; composed for Museum of Modern Art and a retro gaming console; DJed Frank Ocean’s PREP+ party; and performed at a Burberry runway show for Riccardo Tisci. She’s painted her own album art, modeled, co-designed next-generation musical instruments, and built an online community for the horde of self-proclaimed “mutants” who follow her. Seemingly disparate things that in retrospect add up to a single, ever-growing holistic work.

But these are only snapshots, artifacts of the ceaseless movement from one state to the next. Arca’s true artistic medium is transformation itself. It exists in the quantum-like state of infinite potential, further out towards the edge of possibility than most people dare to go. 

Earlier this month Arca debuted her very first NFT titled ‘Rorschach;KiCk’. Created in 2019, it’s an image of the original calligraphy all KiCk typography is sourced from. Each individually hand painted by the artist, Arca painted each symbol in sets of three during a trancelike state, birthing a unique set of font to accompany her multi-album series: KiCk. 

“I don’t want to be tied to one genre,” Arca says. “I don’t want to be labeled as one thing.” Her Grammy-nominated 2020 album KiCK i is a hologram holding all of her musical identities—at least the ones she’s shown us so far—in a state of simultaneous superimposition. Turn it one way and you find Arca the beatmaker, who first grabbed our attention in 2012 with the fractalized club music of her Stretch 1 & 2 EPs. Turn it another way and you encounter a mischievous mind that’s reverse-engineering contemporary pop and re-coding it in her own image. Turn it yet another and you find a Latin chanteuse who first emerged under the name Ghersi–exploring gender on/off stage, through live in-person and online performances. It was through this she came to identify as a nonbinary trans woman. 

As Arca has evolved, she’s dissolved the distinctions between the artist, her art, and the tools she uses to create it. The four-night performance piece, Mutant:Faith, that she debuted at The Shed in 2019, was built around custom-built technology she co-designed that transformed her body into an instrument in ways that have never been tried on stage before—myoelectric sensors that let her play sound with her muscles, a 9-foot-tall dance pole that generated noise through skin contact, and gear that translated her movements into MIDI notes. Since the pandemic has kept away from the stage, she’s continued to experiment with new ways of interfacing with technology, like using software from London-based AI startup Bronze to create 100 different AI-generated remixes of the KiCK i track “Riquiquí.” And now with her latest series of NFT’s:

“The way forward for me in my creative journey began to not only allow for painting but rather require it as a mode of intrapsychic research of the symbols and textures that call out to me. I consider the instances during which I paint as trancelike as my wildest performances on stage. It became clear to me that to find exploration in painting allowed me a sense of play I had all but forgotten in my musicianship, after many more than 10,000 hours in that field. Now my painting work has renewed my love for music, and my textural concerns have found a resonance among both fields I work in. I am very pleased to be able to allow the form of patronage NFTs constitute in the hopes of aiding my further production of more cryptoart. I have many ideas I am currently researching about hopefully new ways to mediate concepts of beauty, identity and the numinous in this field,” explains Arca.

Slur ⚧ is a painting which depicts a playful demonic gaze. Its title, Slur, for me suggests an alchemical transformation of the different slurs I’ve been called throughout my lifetime. The work constitutes a gesture of invoking prejudice as materia prima, a catalyst/fertilizer for my faith in strangers, including those who have at different points had the intention of alienating me with their words. The gesture of this piece is meant as a means of love in the face of fear, hoping to allow for an encounter with numinous love in the face of prejudice and cruelty the context of groupthink-fueled bullying be it in recess playgrounds or on the streets day to day.- Arca

Sometimes, Arca feels like a shard of some potential future jutting into the here and now. But while her work—and she herself—can feel science-fictional, it’s not just theoretical. She seems to emanate change—an extradimensional beacon guiding us into unexplored worlds, splicing snippets of alien DNA into our psychic code. Her musical ideas reverberate through popular music at every level. The experimental instruments she’s helping to design are opening the door to body-based controllers for the mass market. Her Discord group Mutants1000000 has grown into a refuge for “mutants” who share her dream of reshaping the world to fit them better, and who have the potential to effect change in ways that even Arca can’t predict.   

The cover of KiCK i has become the defining image of Arca in this phase of her evolution. She is standing tall and still, the soft curves of her almost-naked body wrapped in the hard metal embrace of a cybernetic exoskeleton. Stilt-like legs give her body a threatening animal posture, and long, curved claws extend downward from her wrists. She’s a war machine at rest, but the expression on her face is serene. She has seen the future, and now she’s inviting us to create it with her.

Text By Miles Raymer

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ARCA: 

Official Arca Website
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