On a frigid February night in 2017, Arca and a cabal of fashion and nightlife icons strolled into the Lower East Side basement dive bar Home Sweet Home.
Only a handful of people in the crowd knew who she was — at the time, she was mostly an experimental electronic producer with a reputation for harnessing industrial dissonance, the high drama of classical composition and uncomfortable metallic grit.
“Dance floors are where I found freedom,” the Venezuelan-born artist said over a video call from her home in Barcelona, Spain, her lips painted a crimson red and a stainless steel choker clinging tightly around her neck.
She has produced for FKA twigs, Björk and Kanye West, modeled in campaigns for Bottega Veneta and Calvin Klein, and composed a constantly transforming soundtrack for the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby using artificial intelligence.
Her latest endeavor is “KICK,” a five-album masterwork accompanied by an elaborate 3-D visual world, conceptualized in collaboration with the multimedia artist Frederik Heyman.
Ghersi often speaks like this, sharing high-level abstractions on the artistic and philosophical motivations of her work.
“For me, it’s important not to be a snapshot of one of my backgrounds, but to be able to map all of those things,” she said.
She grew up moving between the United States and Caracas, playing gaita, a type of folk music, as well as performing dreamy synth pop as Nuuro.
Next came a series of mixtapes and studio albums — “Xen,” “Mutant” and “Arca” — that revealed Ghersi’s gifts as an artist in her own right.
“KiCk i” arrived in the summer of 2020 and contains some of the grandiose, forlorn torch songs that appeared on her self-titled album, as well as features from Björk, Rosalía, Shygirl and Sophie.
The “KICK” albums are inspired by expansive works like “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” the 19th century collection of German operas by Richard Wagner, and the “Cremaster” cycle, an aesthetic universe created by the contemporary artist Matthew Barney that includes feature-length films, sculptures, photographs and drawings.
She described “KICK” as a series of “self-contained, mythical, almost world-building exercises that interrelate to one another,” in a mid-November video interview, wearing a simple gray hoodie.
The visual universe of “KICK,” which includes the videos for “Prada/Rakata” and the album covers, is a bleak technological dystopia, sculpted in 3-D from close-up images of Ghersi’s body.
It just took up all my RAM — that reckoning that I’d been putting off for so long,” she said.
Some of her new tracks venture into the outer edges of mainstream pop, which Ghersi has flirted with more openly over the last few years.
During her 2019 performance series at the Shed in Manhattan, a three-night engagement called “Mutant;Faith,” Arca wore hoofed stilts, munched on her custom acrylic talons and invited audience members to dance with her on a dirt surface that doubled as the stage.
“It is rare to have someone who has both emotional intelligence, high programming technique, performance and singing, humor and drama, gentleness and brutality.
“There’s this weird sweet spot where you can deploy it almost as a way of letting you cross the threshold of pressure exerted on you under that spotlight.
The album artwork for the other installments in the cycle explore similar motifs of body modification via mechanical aberration: a limb converted into a machine gun, or thick electrical wires attached to her nipples.
“Working with these themes of body and technology is something that I’ve been drawn to aesthetically since as long as I can remember,” Ghersi said, citing her love of anime, video games like Final Fantasy and the science fiction of Ursula K.
The process of designing each scene from the series took over a year.
Electronic music has long been a site of affirmation and ideation for queer and trans artists and fans.
When organic tissue and wiring meet, what kinds of gender-soft, border-permeable futures might we be able to dream of? In her new work, Ghersi appears to answer this question more directly.
SHAME IS A feeling Ghersi has spent a lot of time with.
On “Alien Inside,” a demented guitar power ballad, the featured vocalist Shirley Manson of Garbage chants: “Remember the post human celestial sparkle/A mutant faith/A mutant faith/Your dignity.” Ghersi said the term “mutant faith” is a belief in the promise of the othered.
By returning to Spanish, weaving reggaeton textures and Venezuelan folklore and reveling in the possibilities of post humanism, Ghersi is conjuring her own kind of trans immigrant futurism.
“I do see a lot of possibility for the creation of a self that isn’t a photograph, that can change over time,” she said.