Arca
Her electronic music brings fractured rhythms, reggaeton and a fluid understanding of the self into the same restless sound world.
Arca was born in Caracas in 1989. Known as Alejandra Ghersi, she grew up between Venezuela and the United States, making music from an early age before moving to New York and later London.
Her production work reached a wide audience through collaborations with Kanye West on “Yeezus” (2013), FKA Twigs and Björk. On her own records, she developed a sound in which distorted beats, fragile melodies and abrupt changes of texture coexist. “Xen” (2014) and the “Kick” series (2020–2021) draw on electronic experimentation, reggaeton, noise and an increasingly prominent singing voice.
Performance, visual art and changing forms of self-presentation are closely connected to her music. Arca has spoken about being trans and nonbinary and about identity as a process rather than a fixed destination. The bodies and characters in her work often seem to be undergoing that same process of transformation.
In 2022 she announced that her name and gender had been changed in her Venezuelan identity documents. The public account of that change added a concrete legal dimension to themes she had explored through sound, images and performance.