This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
I remember the first time I listened to the song “Sad Bitch” by Arca, from the album Xen. Its discontinuous harmony gradually accelerates until reaching a strident climax before returning to more moderate zones, like droplets falling in sharp fragments. The track moves between density and rupture, between sonic saturation and near-silence, creating a sense of instability that resists resolution. The unstable rhythm mirrored my own emotional landscape at the time, marked by moments of intensity, fragmentation, and reconfiguration. Listening to Arca was not simply an aesthetic experience, but one that resonated with a process of becoming—of coming into and out of forms that did not yet feel fixed or fully legible. The sounds Arca produces often break with stable musical structures; abruptness and discontinuity are central to her sonic language. These gestures of undoing form, of interrupting continuity and coherence, open up alternative ways of understanding music, not as a linear or harmonious progression, but as a space of tension, rupture, and transformation.
Since then, Arca’s music has taken on multiple forms. During the pandemic, the Venezuelan artist Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez, better known as Arca, released an expansive body of work that moved from experimental electronic compositions to the integration of Latin rhythms, such as reggaeton, as well as an increased use of Spanish. She is widely recognized for her collaborations with artists such as Björk, FKA twigs, Kanye West, and Rosalía, positioning her as a central figure in contemporary electronic and experimental music. It was not until March 2024, when I attended her performance at the AXE Ceremonia festival in Mexico City, that I was able to experience in a more embodied and sensory way the relationship between sonic and bodily transmutation that pervades her music. Even now—despite her growing mainstream recognition—Arca remains an artist to whom one can become deeply attached or, conversely, feel disoriented by, given her departure from expected musical frameworks. This is largely because her work engages sonic forms that can be perceived as harsh or that resist conventional melodic structures, at times appearing to some listeners as mere noise.
This ambivalence appeared in the account of a friend who attended her DJ set during 2026 New Year’s celebrations in Mexico City, as part of an event known as “La Fiesta Electrónica Más Grande del Mundo.” He described groups of fans eager to hear her compositions alongside families who, having come to celebrate, seemed perplexed, unsure how to respond to what they were hearing. That uncertainty is central to Arca’s practice. Her music unfolds through abrupt shifts in tempo, texture, and intensity, moving between moments of near-silence and dense, distorted soundscapes that resist predictable patterns. Rather than guiding the listener toward resolution, these sonic movements generate a sustained sense of surprise and unease.
For those unfamiliar with her work, listening to Arca can feel disorienting: beats dissolve before they fully form, melodies fracture, and the voice itself often appears altered, stretched, or multiplied. This disorientation, however, is not merely aesthetic; it opens a speculative space for imagining bodies and identities otherwise. It gestures toward forms of becoming that are unstable, unfinished, and resistant to fixed categorization. Such dynamics can be observed both in Arca’s own process of sonic and bodily transformation and in the fluid, ambiguous identifications through which many of her listeners come to recognize themselves.
Drawing on a musical style that moves from experimental electronic into diverse territories such as avant-pop and reggaeton, Arca proposes a constant disruption, both bodily and identitarian. Her work is not limited to fixed forms or genres; rather, its singular sonic plasticity ranges from the discordant to the melodic and the erotic. In collaboration with visual artists such as Jesse Kanda, Daniel Sannwald, and Frederik Heyman, she constructs a sonic and visual universe defined by rupture, mutation, and discontinuity. These strategies resist fixed classifications while also unsettling notions of gendered embodiment and national identity, articulating both aesthetics of play and desiring spatialities. Rather than signaling collapse, these discontinuities function as generative breaks through which bodies and worlds remain in formation.
Thus, Arca’s work produces multiple folds from which to think about the body and cultural forms in constant transit, mediated by the production of desire. I argue that her work proposes a distinctly transnational Latin American aesthetic of transformation, one that links sonic experimentation to migration, language, and trans embodiment as a speculative method. Through the increasing presence of her voice and the use of Spanish alongside English, her music unsettles Anglophone expectations of experimental electronic sound while foregrounding the cultural and political textures of Venezuelan displacement and diasporic circulation between Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Here, I examine how Arca’s aesthetic expressions dislocate both the sonic realm and her corporeality, situating transness as a material and speculative practice.
Undoing/making in Arca’s work
Arca’s sonic trajectory can be understood as a movement from largely instrumental, texturally driven compositions toward an increasingly vocal and linguistically explicit practice. Across her early albums, the emphasis falls on fragmented rhythms, dense sound design, and a minimal or heavily processed use of voice, whereas in her later work the voice becomes a more central expressive and affective element, alongside a growing incorporation of Spanish in dialogue with English. This shift not only reconfigures her sonic language but also expands the ways in which identity, embodiment, and transness are articulated through sound. As Michael Waugh notes in “Arca: Mute’s Mutant,” early albums such as Xen (2014) and Mutant (2015) are characterized by fragmented textures and limited vocal presence; from Arca (2017) onward, however, her voice moves to the foreground, “utilizing her native Spanish and wordless intonations to explore her transnational identity and to disrupt the interpretations of a predominantly Anglophone audience.”
Arca’s work proposes a distinctly transnational Latin American aesthetic of transformation, one that links sonic experimentation to migration, language, and trans embodiment as a speculative method.
The self-titled album is thus particularly significant insofar as it stages a form of making: the emergence of her voice in Spanish does not simply add linguistic clarity, but reconfigures what had previously been dispersed, fragmented, and sonically decentered. What is undone here is precisely the earlier suspension of voice as a stable presence, as vocality becomes more legible while remaining unstable—folding into distortion, modulation, and sonic excess. In this sense, the articulation of Spanish operates both as a return and as a transformation, where processes of grounding and undoing coexist within her evolving sonic practice.
In a short period of time, between 2020 and 2021—possibly driven by the frenzy of the Covid-19 pandemic—Arca released five consecutively numbered albums under the title KiCk. The few critical works that exist on this series have largely focused on analyzing the visual work developed by Heyman in the music videos “Nonbinary” (KiCk i, 2020) and “Prada / Rakata” (KICK ii, 2021). Both draw on symbols from Greek mythology—such as the tragedy Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus and the myth of Sisyphus—as well as Renaissance elements like The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, to construct scenes and worlds that seem situated in decay and destruction, in dialogue with technological advancements and accelerated modes of labor.
The figure of Prometheus bound appears in two moments of Arca’s visual work. Before releasing the first KiCk album, the artist put out the mixtape @@@@@, in which a nude body resembling her own is shown resting on the hood and windshield of a destroyed car, from which cables emerge and connect to six breasts on Arca’s figure. A kind of laser is also visible, extending from the vulva to the navel and attached to her limbs. In the background, a virtualized image of the artist appears as a hologram projected onto the ground.
The scene stages the subjugation of the body to various technological devices; just as Prometheus is punished for giving fire to humanity, here we see an Arca dominated by a technological era that is not foreign to the present. The 62-minute, 20-second mixtape moves through discontinuous rhythms and sounds that evoke the human, only to transform into technified sonorities.
A new Promethean figure reappears at the beginning of the video for “Nonbinary”: Arca, naked and laid upon a floating rock as if evaporating. Her body is pierced by scissors in the abdomen and fitted with various technological attachments on her legs and head that seem to immobilize her, while she is surrounded by robotic insects. The video is accompanied by the song’s lyrics superimposed onto the moving image, beginning with the phrase: “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it,” alternating between uppercase and lowercase letters, giving the words a sense of motion.
This opening scene—before transitioning to the next moment in which Arca appears giving birth—can be interpreted as a sacrifice of her corporeality in order to transmute into other, more desirable forms of herself. This is represented in the video through a reference to The Birth of Venus: Arca is reborn into a body in constant recomposition, intervened upon by four robotic arms equipped with a laser. The artist displaces the ideals of beauty associated with this Venus toward forms that challenge binary notions of gender, also configuring an allegory of her trans body.
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Rubén Darío Martínez Ramírez is a PhD student at The City University of New York. Their research focuses on theories of sexual and gender dissidence, ecology and climate change, as well as philosophy and literature from the past few centuries.