It takes a lot to bring together Bushwick queers and the grandparents of the Upper East Side, yet engineering the impossible is Arca’s trademark, and she is yet to underdeliver.

On a series of warm mid-October nights in New York, hundreds of people from all over the world and all walks of life, convened at the Park Avenue Armory to experience the avant-pop mastermind’s latest project: a four-day artistic residency, cryptically titled Mutant;Destrudo. Stepping into the pitch-black room felt like entering a sensory deprivation tank, with a crowd of brave strangers, where the intuition to make your way front and center was completely derailed by the unconventional stage design. The decentralized layout would have been familiar to guests of her four-day Mutant;Faith show at The Shed in 2019. It resembled an elevated catwalk in the shape of an ‘M’; on the far left of the room, a tall scaffolding structure towered over a transformed grand piano spewing electrical wires; in the center, a long runway ended with a futuristic surgical table; and on the far right, a DJ booth was fashioned out of decks swinging from ceiling-high chains.

With the promise of a performance that would shatter the boundaries between audience and performer, transforming their similarities and differences into the will to survive, love, and connect with themselves and each other, this latest chapter of her ongoing ‘Mutant’ show series, referenced death and the idea of transformation fueled by destruction and rebirth, aptly centering the transitional journey integral to queer and trans identity.

After what felt like endless minutes of anticipatory chatter, the LED screen overhead flickered on and the audience saw their mirror image, a giant coagulation of faces smiling back at themselves. Sound ripped through the space. The first glimpse of Arca, or Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez as she’s known off-stage, ricocheted around the room with the help of numerous canonized speakers. At one moment, she seemed to be standing next to you, whispering in your ear, while the next she was across the room, sharing a moment with someone else. Her sensory playfulness gave her an enthralling, hair-raising presence before she even appeared on stage.

Each night, she improvised the structure of the show, but there were a few consistencies: she flitted around the room; climbed the scaffolding; laid upside down in the surgical chair, where she teased her now-released music video for ‘Incendio’; and stepped off the stage to walk among the crowd as if herding disciples with her siren song. She would pause between acts and change outfits in front of the crowd, engulfed by her styling and beauty team. Eventually emerging from the obscurity, she had transformed for the next leg of our journey together. Each time, the crowd hung on her every movement, their awed expressions screened live on the LED screen behind her. “She shares so much when she performs; she really is a portal of energy,” recalls Nina Carelli, well-known SFX artist and member of Arca’s beauty team, “It felt amazing to witness that there’s a whole diverse community living for this kind of art. We were all there for one singular reason: to witness sorcery.” 

On opening night, Arca revealed the boots she wore were custom-made with special technology. “Bear with me,” she asked the crowd while sidebarring with the tech team to get them working, “let’s try these MIDI boots.” They were white, thigh-high boots with tall stiletto heels made by Abra, installed with microphones and MIDI triggers made by Landscape. She began a kind of flamenco dance down the catwalk, knocking her heels and toes into the floor to create a rhythmic beat that echoed through the space. She seemed to ground and relax everyone, welcoming any unplanned moment into existence. When a piece of her outfit came unraveled, she would dance around, relishing in the entropy. “Alejandra is so into the decomposition of a look throughout the show,” Carelli explained, “There were moments when there would be stuff hanging from her that wasn’t supposed to be coming unglued, and Luisa (the hairstylist) and I would be holding each other backstage like ‘No! That piece is about to fall off!’ she laughs, “We realized she was actually embracing it all. It was so fun to let go and let things run their course; I found a lot of peace in that.” 

On closing night, she proposed a choice to the crowd between whether to continue playing music or to have a conversation—we chose conversation. She sauntered along the central catwalk and crouched down to hold the microphone to audience members’ lips. One person mentioned it was their birthday and Arca excitedly demanded the entire crowd sing them ‘Happy Birthday’. When she spoke Spanish with her fans, one person mentioned they had traveled all the way from Venezuela to see the show, while another spoke of how happy they were to have a community here, because they didn’t have one where they came from. 

Throughout the show, an augmented reality character mirrored her motions on the LED screen. Whenever she took a step, the Arca-esque creature would take a stride; when she lifted her microphone, the creature would swing its arms. These visuals were made in collaboration with Rhizomatiks and Team Rolfes, experts in 3D programming and virtual character development. Within 4 days of receiving the assignment, Team Rolfes had executed 3 different characters, from conceptualization to optimization, for the Rhizomatiks team, headed by Daito Manabe, to take to animation.

It was a constant organic process where everyone was motivated to create work to their best abilities; “We were iterating throughout, at least the first couple shows,” Array Bercov of Team Rolfes tells V. “Sam was updating the skin texture and removing certain elements, like the eyes, to make the third look more monstrous. There was an implicit trust that everyone was going to keep pushing as far as was necessary to make this amazing.” In turn, this trust gave rise to immense freedom in the creative process. “I normally shy away from the techy, cybernetic aesthetic, but this project gave me permission to lean into that fully and it came together so effortlessly,” says Sam Rolfes. “We were able to go hyper-detailed and just have fun with the character, not worrying about being off-brand, off-style, or off-model.”

Amidst these mesmerizing psychedelic-tech visuals, Arca alternated between riling the crowd up with her upbeat songs and calming them down with her ghostly, angelic originals. In the calmer moments, she would spend time improvising on an invention she described as an electro-acoustic piano, offering a sacred window into her creative process and technological exploration. This was a notable moment for Rolfes, who praised, “She didn’t have to include a crazy elevated CDJ-synth system on a swing or the electro-acoustic piano; the audience would have loved it either way. Their inclusion shows her devotion and real interest in these nuanced, avant-garde performance modes that so few people have the opportunity or the guts to place front and center. I have so much respect for that decision because these things are often secondary, tertiary, or not even involved on stage.”

The formal name of the instrument is a magnetic resonator piano, or MRP, invented by Andrew McPherson. Since 2008, he has made 3 major generations of the instrument, with some equipment like the optical keyboard scanner debuting at the Mutant;Destrudo show. The sensors measure the continuous position of each key, by reflecting light off the back of the keyboard. Meanwhile, the electromagnets “bow” the strings of the piano, which let them sustain indefinitely without requiring physical force on the key, giving the piano its unearthly abilities. It was collaborating with other composers that exposed the instrument’s true potential, as McPherson says, “When I started, all the techniques I thought would be interesting turned out to be pretty boring, whereas the wildest and most unusual sounds are often drawn out by really good creative artists, like Alejandra.” One of these sounds was the deliberate cultivation of a buzzing produced when Arca tried putting the magnets too close to the strings. “She discovered and developed some techniques like this that I hadn’t seen before, despite working with dozens of musicians over more than a decade. Working with her was so inspiring and a lot of fun.” 

These unexpected turns fueled innovative design across the board, Carelli testifies, telling us about a quick adjustment one night that created some leading imagery for the rest of the show. “I made these prosthetics with stitches that were intended to be torn angel wings on her back. We quickly realized that they didn’t fully read because they were hidden behind her extensions. She suggested we repurpose them as nipple covers, which totally transformed the prosthetic. It just happened to create this incredibly celebratory symbolism. I’m so grateful to be a part of creating meaningful imagery like that.” On the augmented reality side, Bercov echoes, “Alejandra shares a kindred spirit in her deep nerdom about tech and art, and the tying of that into an exploration of gender and queerness. There’s so few people who have that spotlight; these are the contributions to culture that I love being a part of.” 

Except for the three-act format of her performance, Arca’s Mutant;Destrudo hardly resembled a traditional concert performance at all. It felt more like the intersection of a religious ceremony and a performance art piece. A choked-up kind of night, where friends could be seen either gaping in awe at Arca standing feet before them or hugging their friends in a kind of community seance. You could feel the audience breathing in the same air and crying out the same tears. So rarely are people offered a safe place to celebrate the entire spectrum of their emotions and identity together, and to be part of a community of strangers sharing in this catharsis was immensely peacemaking. As we venture further into the exploration of the technological space, and especially as we consider AI, symbiotic relationships, and what humanity and its advances may mean for us as a society, I hope we will see more work like this. Mutant;Destrudo is a powerful example of what can happen when an artist leans into this space and makes it accessible for a wide group of people, meshing art, nature, community, and technology to guide us to beautiful revelations.

The week was sponsored by The Park Avenue Armory with public support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.