Arca. The post-human cyborg that Donna Haraway wanted for us

Abstract

Arca, also known as Alejandra Ghersi, is a trans producer of electronic music of Venezuelan origin. Since she published her first mixtape &&&&& in 2013, she has not stopped revolutionising the experimental electronic music scene and has become an icon who appears on the covers of Vogue, The Wire, or as the image of Calvin Klein’s last advertising campaign. Iconoclast fetishisms and mainstream on the margins, Arca is not actually a trans electronic music artist. The thesis that this text attempts to demonstrate is that Alejandra Ghersi is possibly the most precise, rigorous and intellectually armed construction of the cyborg that Donna Haraway described in her mythic fabula of 1984. Arca’s appearance on the underground scene with her mixtape 25’ &&&&& marked the beginning of the construction of her own imaginary together with Jesse Kanda. This imaginary is built around rethinking and reformulating the concept of body, with bizarre references that go against the beauty cannon, and with its own aesthetic of foetuses and physical malformations that emulate real beings that are digitally developed and transform the deformed into something strange and beautiful. It is an imaginary totally linked to a singular, arrhythmic, histrionic and uncomfortable musical production that is difficult to classify and possesses a technical quality that has led Arca to be the producer of Björk’s last two works. At the end of 2017, following several singles that put ARCA in the spotlight of electronic music criticism worldwide, she released what would be her first complete work (LP) with the title ARCA. With this work —that emerges and which, to date, is considered one of the 10 best electronic musical works of the 21st century—, Alejandra surprises all of her followers with a proposal in which she sings lyrics in Spanish, composed by her, which closely resemble a baroque aria, both in their content and in the way she interprets them. From this moment when she physically appeared, not only was she no longer limiting herself to a sort of digital identity in the form of many different avatars; but, in addition, in videoclips and live performances, the body and presence of, who at that time was still Alejandro Gershi, intervened with prostheses, artifacts and clothing that, together with his interpretation, turned his live acts into performances that combine action art, music and reinterpretations of the binary, the body and physical and virtual identity in a sort of indissoluble corpus. The case study that this text will develop in order to explain who Arca is in her con- ception of queer artist, transgressor and non-binary activist, is her acting or performance in the Sónar 2019 music festival in Barcelona. This performance is an action in three acts in which the audience could see, hear and experiment the virtual and physical identity of Arca in the same space and in real time. A spatial control, as well as the technical and technological construction of a heterotopia collective which, if it were not built from the total artist, could only be built with difficulty.