{"id":377795,"date":"2026-04-06T11:54:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T11:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/377795\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T11:54:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T11:54:07","slug":"it-was-a-way-of-processing-violences-ive-survived-how-iconoclastic-musician-arca-beat-burnout-with-frenzied-painting-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/377795\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It was a way of processing violences I\u2019ve survived\u2019: how iconoclastic musician Arca beat burnout with frenzied painting | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before Arca had released eight albums, including her Kick pentalogy; before she had collaborated with Bj\u00f6rk and Rosal\u00eda and supported Beyonc\u00e9 and Madonna in concert; the electronic musician, real name Alejandra Ghersi, was a young teen in her Caracas bedroom, uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt<\/a>, the early-00s social media site for artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs many renderings as my family\u2019s computer could handle,\u201d the 36-year-old recalls. This interest in visual art comes full circle when the musician opens her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London.<\/p>\n

double quotation markI was in a very strict closet. I would pray every night for God to change me into a straight cis person<\/p>\n

Her medium now is painting, thickly layering canvases with oils, acrylic, spray paint, marker pen, glitter, latex and melted plastic. From this graffitied impasto, nightmarish faces emerge: Cheshire cat grins, gurning clowns and wide-eyed demons. They were never meant to be shown publicly, Ghersi embarking on them as a way of getting over the \u201cburnout\u201d she experienced from a meteoric decade in the music industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an attempt to reconnect with the creative enthusiasm I had when I started out in music, first as a hobby and a passion, before seeing it as a profession,\u201d Ghersi says. \u201cI fell out of love with making music for a while. I didn\u2019t know how to start to make another record.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got one canvas, and then another, and then another, experimenting. I could feel myself going into a trance-like state, just trying to develop different techniques of creating texture. When recording music, it can be overwritten or re-recorded. You can always undo things. With a physical medium, it\u2019s raw, there\u2019s no delete button.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stabbed materials with a knife \u2026 Arca AKA Alejandra Ghersi. Photograph: Bryan Berrios<\/p>\n

The paintings, collectively titled Angels, were made in a communal yard she shares with her neighbours in Barcelona, where the Venezuelan now lives. Ghersi says each work was composed quite viscerally and sometimes produced in a frenzy, painting and overpainting, melting plastic on to the surface of a work and even stabbing the materials with a knife.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a way of processing different violences that I had survived, those I compartmentalised to make my life seem more stable.\u201d Does she mean that painting provided a kind of therapy? \u201cEven after a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, I realised understanding was not going to be found through language but through feeling. I probably scared my neighbours a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conversations with Ghersi, who is queer and transgender, diverge from the intensely personal, to deep dives into Old Testament images of godly wrath, 11th-century mystics or psychoanalysis. She says she sees the paintings as being both \u201cmutants and angels\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, mutation is a form of becoming in a very post-Darwinian way of understanding biology and natural phenomena that constitute our cosmos. Biblical representations of angels describe them as a tumult of wings and eyes, not these sweet cherubim. It\u2019s as abject as you get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Created in a frenzy \u2026 Angels. Photograph: Mark Blower<\/p>\n

She says that her days on DeviantArt were born of an isolated childhood. The family were well-off, but the security situation in Caracas meant she couldn\u2019t go out on her own and she felt at odds with her preppy school friends. With her father\u2019s job in finance they had moved to Connecticut when she was three, where no one could pronounce her name, and then when they moved back to Caracas in 1998, her Venezuelan friends referred to her as \u201cgringo\u201d, given how North Americanised her accent had become. She was also in the closet: \u201cA very strict closet \u2026 I would literally pray every night for God to change me into a straight cis person.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was music, however, that enabled her escape, and she produced electronic tracks when she was prodigiously young. She became something of a phenomenon on the local scene, even if her parents had to accompany her to gigs. \u201cI would write love songs without really having ever been in love. I felt I was betraying myself though, as I\u2019d always write the lyrics ungendered or keep the pronouns vague.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having turned 18, a move back to the US to study at NYU brought freedom, her real education provided by the club scene. She shed her old stage name and released her first EP under the name Arca. More music followed, her sound veering between the ethereal and poppy to industrial and glitchy reggaeton, the vocals switching freely between Spanish and English. The album art, music videos and stage shows, all of which Arca was intimately involved in, are no less experimental. She sang about sex and falling in love with men.<\/p>\n

Nightmarish \u2026 Angels. Photograph: Mark Blower<\/p>\n

Ghersi has gone back to play in Venezuela, DJing for a Boiler Room party two years ago<\/a>, but says even then Amnesty International sent representatives, a precaution given how many LGBTQ+ Venezuelans were present. \u201cIt\u2019s so Orwellian there and it\u2019s only gotten worse, especially with the recent US intervention. There\u2019s a lot of machismo, very patriarchal attitudes. I have hope things will get better and that we\u2019ll be able to build a community again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kick iiiii<\/a>, her last studio album, was released in 2021 and, although Arca has been performing live and producing, no new material of her own appeared until two tracks popped up a year ago, the dreamy Sola<\/a>, and an aggressively horny rap titled Puta<\/a>. Now a full album is forthcoming, she says, thanks to the healing she was able to work through on canvas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe psyche is miraculous,\u201d Ghersi says. \u201cOver the course of time we fragment and fracture through trauma, and hopefully somehow recombine and stay steady enough to survive and, if you\u2019re lucky, reach a point where it\u2019s safe to unpack those experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arca is at ICA, London<\/a>, 4-19 April<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Arca had released eight albums, including her Kick pentalogy; before she had collaborated with Bj\u00f6rk and Rosal\u00eda…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-377795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}