The Divine Mutability of Arca

Welcome to the Now List, them.’s annual celebration of visionary LGBTQ+ artists, activists, and community members. Read more from our honorees here, and check out the full list of winners here.

To experience the uncanny is to encounter something eerily familiar — a sensation that goes beyond our capacity to remember, but not our ability to feel. I felt the uncanny the first time I listened to Arca. This was a year or so ago, not long after I had added trans to my identity as a non-binary person. A shudder shot through my chest as I heard the initial hums of “Piel” (or “Skin”), the first track on the Venezuelan artist’s 2017 self-titled debut album. As the song continued, it wasn’t just the lyrics, which literally translate to “take off my skin of yesterday,” that summoned an unnervingly relatable trans narrative. It was the overall sonic landscape — glitchy, harsh, though unmistakably intimate, interior, nearly infantile. I knew where I was.

With a remarkable degree of precision, “Piel” revealed itself as a dispatch from the metaphorical womb from which the trans human births themself. Earlier this week, when I told Alejandra Ghersi (who uses it/its pronouns as Arca) of this experience, she took it in stride, nodding calmly before explaining the title of her latest work, out Friday from XL. “The reason why KiCK i is called KiCK i is because of the prenatal kick,” she said. “It's the first instance in which an unborn child manifests its will in a way that's irrevocably distinct from the parents.” The metaphor lives on.

Zooming with Alejandra is both exactly what you’d expect and completely disarming. For starters, she appears in front of a flickering rainbow background. She clearly hasn’t updated her Zoom app, which seems intentional: Without the new technology that allows for seamless integration of subject and background, Alejandra exists as a jittery alchemy of flesh and flashing lights.“Using technology to speak, and that technology has glitches, can be expressive,” she offers, adding, “I think it’s funny.”

And that’s what’s so disarming. It is funny, and so is she. If you’ve ever seen Alejandra perform as Arca, through either its 2019 residency at The Shed, Mutant;Faith, or its catalog of music videos, you’ll know its presence can often be severe, demanding, uncompromisingly avant-garde. Yet when we recently caught up about its new album, the intricacies of non-binary identity, and its perspective on divinity, Arca was gentle, even effusive. Brutal or bubbly, Arca discusses its work with singular spontaneity — a truth demonstrated in the following conversation, which, it should be noted, took place on what would have been the 73rd birthday of the author who gave KiCK i its epigraph: Octavia Butler. Cosmic occurrences such as these should come as no surprise where Arca is concerned. They’re par for the course.

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