Not much was known about Mutant;Destrudo, Arca’s commission for the Park Avenue Armory, which ran for four nights this October. The Armory website’s description (bless them) was so enigmatic, my friend and I began jokingly misquoting it to each other, saying we couldn’t wait to “deconstruct preconceived notions, or whatever.”
Even the performance dates were hard to understand: Wednesday–Friday shows at 8 p.m., dark on Saturday, Sunday at 6. Its opening night arrived on October 11, and the scene outside the Armory, whose usual crowd is mostly settled in Lenox Hill amber, was delightfully discombobulating. Young people of gloriously indiscernible gender, along with seemingly every queer person in New York media, were smoking cigarettes past the usually strictly-enforced start time, wearing the cut-out K.ngsley tank tops they usually save for Bushwick warehouse raves and chatting excitedly about their Arca bonafides: who had seen the multi-channel music video that MoMA exhibited for “black lake,” a song she’d produced for Björk; did anyone have any clue as to what the evening would entail, and so on.
All of this was typical for Arca, the professional name of Alejandra Ghersi, a Venezuelan musician who has built her reputation through glitchy, ambient, and reggaeton-inspired production work for artists like Kanye West, FKA Twigs, and Rosalía. Then came her own rise through inventive, artistic performances—like the five-album KiCk cycle (2020–2021)—which went hand in hand with performative artistry, as evidenced in her Instagram’s flurry of techno-punk memes and frank discussions of her evolving gender identity.
What wound up happening during Mutant;Destrudo, in the Armory’s cavernous Drill Hall, was more or less a typical (if phenomenally calibrated) concert performance—yet its very existence in that very traditional mode paradoxically pushed it further into performance art. In its review, the New York Times called Arca a “Schrödinger’s diva, simultaneously performing stardom and deconstructing it.” It’s a good way to put it since, even after experiencing her show firsthand, I had some questions.
Because, while she performed some of her best-known songs, like “Reverie” and “Mequetrefe,” the two-hour show was anything but ordinary. Otherworldly lullabies turned to four-on-the-floor bangers turned to breathy descriptions of the new technologies the show was using, told in an excitable flurry so intimate that it verged on the conspiratorial. Some of these innovations emerged without explanation, suggesting a finished-stage showcase of Arca’s artistry; others seemed to be purposely presented as works in progress. The talent on display was never in doubt, though, her vocals as ethereal or city-slick as she demanded they be.
The bare stage was flanked by two extensions: one featuring an “augmented piano,” on which magnets created a electromagnetic field that amplified the keys’ sensitivity, causing them to react before even being touched, and a sort of jungle gym on which she spun vertically on gymnastic rings; the other a Moog synthesizer suspended on four chains, like something you’d see in a mad scientist’s lab. A giant screen on the center wall overlooked a catwalk and the accessible audience risers dividing the hall. At one point, she wore what she referred to as “MIDI heels,” which created, then distorted, sound with her every step. When one of these stopped working, she tapped her headpiece mic and asked her sound guy for more beats in her ears, ushering the production’s behind-the-scenes elements front and center. After taking the heels off, she led the mostly standing audience around the floor in a Catholic pageant of adulation.
But one scene, if I can call it that, held my attention. Her team emerged and helped her change wigs and outfits, after which she climbed into a giant robot thing that they tooled around with for what felt like eternity, the screen overhead displaying what could be the view from within the robot, but was obviously prerecorded. Inside the thing, her body writhed as her face in the video twitched, and then she was out again. The act seemed calculated to draw attention to the nature of performance: the futility of planning and the innate specialness of in-the-moment creation. The puzzled audience leaned in, trying to get a peek into what was going on in there—and that effect proved to be among the commission’s main tenets, with white lights blinding the eyes, blackouts enhancing the ears, and guttural techno thumps activating our psychic touch.
The music’s inherent fluidity and improvisation made it hard to separate new material from in-the-moment creation, but the set list points to at least one new song, “Xeno Genesis.” Mutant;Faith, Arca’s 2019 commission for the Shed, featured the launch of mostly new work that would wind up on Soundcloud DJ mixes or across the KiCk cycle. If her centerstage persona took off during lockdown, Mutant;Destrudo might point to the birth of a new era.
When Arca’s answers came—many days later—via email, they shed light on a few of my lingering queries, with some caveats. (Minus one, which I deduced myself: On that aforementioned dark Saturday she kept to herself, celebrating her 34th birthday.) They introduced me to a cast of characters she referred to only by lower-caps first names, sending me into a first-order Google spree that opened as many doors as it shut behind. That seems to be Arca’s project—to draw in, wash out, blend, destroy, create.
“Destrudo,” after all, comes from the Freudian idea of the human drive toward death and destruction. The name fits Arca’s aphotic aesthetics, sure, but is a curious choice for a show so predicated on human connection and revelation. “I feel really comfortable,” she said at one point in the show, beaming. “I can feel your hearts open, listening to every beat, and I’m grateful. You have no idea.”
Below are Arca’s answers, her syntax kept intact.
Vogue: You once told Vogue that your previous show, Mutant:Faith, was about “working through a trauma” and self-immolation. Here, you seem to have, if not surpassed it, then reached a more cathartic point of control and release. What emotions did you structure Destrudo around?
Arca: Joy, sorrow, longing, gratitude, celebrational energy.
With whiteouts, you make us look away—as you do when you spend a long time onstage changing looks, daring our eyes to wander. With spotlight-only blackouts, you make us lean in. Tell me about what you feel is important to show and hide in your shows, and describe the role of courting a certain type of oblivion in them.
It was my intention to constellate many instances in which the fourth wall could exist not just as a point of demarcation between audience and performer but also as a liminal space that could be zoomed in on infinitely, like a fractal.
What energies do you channel while on the synths?
When I play synths I allow myself to feel my emotions on a deeper plane, a more abstract level. More important than the instrument I am playing however is the fact that they are improvisations. I drift into musical “stream of consciousness” that surprises even me.
Around the time of Faith, you said you were finding pleasure in fashion. Now you’re pushing it forward through new technologies. Is the goal to invent your own wearable pleasure?
I think the blurring of fashion and technology is an interesting topic to contemplate. The main thing I strive for is augmented expressivity.
Tell me about your technology and looks! Including, of course, the incredible augmented piano and MIDI heels.
Professor Andrew McPherson* developed a magnetically resonated piano. My friend and colleague Lex of Bronze** showed me the instrument in a video a while ago and for years I waited to finally play music on the last time I went to London at a university Andrew researches at.
The midi heels were an idea I’ve proposed to all my fashion designer friends as something that would be amazing for runway shows. “Imagine a show where every models footsteps are heard and the sound can morph into music,” I’d say. I guess it was too complicated to develop. But I’m glad I finally waited and did the idea myself enlisting the aid of Eric*** at Landscape to install the midi sensor on a heel designed by Abra who both worked well with my audio team to help me make the dream of footstep heels/remote midi triggered high heels come to life.
*Imperial College London’s Chair in Design Engineering and Music
**Per its site, “a new technology that allows music creators to utilize Al and machine learning as creative tools for composition and arrangement. Bronze is also an audio file format that will revolutionize music playback, enabling artists to release non-static and generative music.”
***Eric Pitra, a Brooklyn based “music innovator”