Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez (born 14 October 1989), known professionally as Arca, is a Venezuelan musician and record producer based in Barcelona, Spain.
1: “When you’re uncomfortable, that’s when you learn something new about yourself.”
2: “I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We’re all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.”
3: “Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.”
4: “I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they’re making it for someone who they don’t think is real. Their audience isn’t real. But it’s still a communicative act. It’s still an outward manifestation of longing.”
5: “I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.”
6: “Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence’s biography on him, ‘Hold on to Your Dreams,’ one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.”
7: “Arca means ‘box’ or ‘wooden’ in very old Spanish. It’s a ceremonial container where you store jewelry or valuables, an empty space that can become pregnant with whatever music or meaning I give to it.”
8: “I hoped that being attracted to men might go away, but what I never ever hoped would go away were the feelings of femininity, and of softness and fragility, that could live inside of a boy. They were private, but they were mine.”
9: “If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.”
10: “I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.”
11: “I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.”
12: “When I met Bjork, I felt like it was a friendship first; it was like an oxygen you get from a person you only can exist with symbiotically. It’s one of the most beautiful relationships I’ve had. She is incredible.”
13: “With ‘Lonely Thug,’ I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.”
14: “!We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you’re most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.”
15: “The first CD I bought was Brandy and Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine.'”
16: “It’s not about living my life as a boy or a girl – but I’m also not trans – it’s just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what’s most fertile for me.”
17: “With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.”
18: “That’s been a huge recurring thing in growing up – allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.”
19: “It’s very human to try to put things into boxes, and it’s hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that’s the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.”
20: “When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.”