The club is not often treated as a site of “serious” cultural production. DJs are rarely written about the way painters or sculptors are, too recreational to be taken as seriously as the art that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth. But the DJ is a cultural worker whose medium happens to be nightlife. The set, the performance, the aesthetic persona, and the spaces they build are all doing the same work that any artist does. Barcelona is a city where that work is taken seriously—a city with a remarkable density of talent, where questions of care, community, and softness are treated as legitimate artistic subjects. One of these artists is Meritxell de Soto. De Soto works across performance and sound, materializing her internal world through each project and brushing topics like the artistic labor behind a DJ set, the political stakes of a safe space, or the implicit knowledge carried in the body. Her work engages a familiar artistic question: how do you give form to experiences that feel impossible to articulate?

That inquiry was present in El Banquet, the residency project de Soto developed at Canino.fm, where I first heard her work. Structured after Plato's Symposium, each iteration of the work invited a guest to share music that evoked love and explain why—a simple premise that opened onto something larger.

I was super obsessed with the text El Banquete [Plato's Symposium] as a teenager. What I discovered early on was that it's about love, but it's not about love. Love is an excuse to talk about other things: tenderness, the political, the moral.

As a DJ, De Soto comes from an electronic music background, where the dance floor demands constant energy. But her other artistic projects bring together something softer. In her artistic practice, she often returns to what she describes as la deriva—the drift. Her projects create conditions and then step back, leaving room for people to find their own way through them.

I discovered that if there is silence between songs, or moments when the tempo drops, that's how you serve the music. In my daily life, I'm more in contact with silence. It's necessary to find time to just listen, to discover things, to leave space for thoughts to develop. And to go into la deriva. To navigate a sea of thoughts and go wherever, not trying to find a place where you have to finish your trip. It's more like opening different paths.

Across her practice, de Soto explores collective experiences and more intimate, personal forms of care. For example, djself_care, a parallel project to El Banquet, applies the same ideas of care and connection internally. Where El Banquet builds a cozy space for others, djself_care is de Soto tending to herself. Tenderness, in de Soto's lexicon, is a deliberate strategy for producing closeness, vulnerability, and attention. It shapes her work and determines how a project unfolds and how an audience is invited into it. It also reflects the influence of bell hooks, whose writing has informed de Soto's thinking about what it means to insist on the emotional as a legitimate site of knowledge.

An approach of tenderness for me is so important. Recently my partner was asking me what I like most about myself, and I said coziness—this obsession to find coziness within people, with myself, with the music, with the space. From All About Love by bell hooks, I connected with the idea of not entering knowledge in a pretentious way, but entering knowledge through the affective. From the beginning of history in the West, we were given the idea that the emotional world is not valuable. And bell hooks is one of the philosophers who challenged that by saying it's the base of life.

Softness in this light is a political position. To center care, coziness, and tenderness in a scene built on cool detachment and technical mastery is to challenge what kinds of values are considered legitimate within the culture. The ways de Soto makes that argument is multifold: through the silence she leaves in a set, the intimacy she designs into a radio show, the vulnerability she builds into a performance. 

That idea is also evident in de Soto's performance work, Espai Segur (Safe Space), a piece that emerged from a structural absence of care in nightlife environments. Nightlife, as it has become increasingly commercialized, has also become increasingly narrow. What was once a space that could hold conversation and community organizing has been flattened into a dance floor and bar. Espai Segur takes the position that the club is mutually produced by every body that moves through it, and that the labor of making it safe belongs to everyone in the room.

In a choreographed DJ performance, de Soto mixes music from the floor, operating the decks with her feet, hips, and hands. The performance unsettles the familiar composed and controlled image of the DJ as someone who remains apart from a crowd. In its place, de Soto foregrounds a body that bends, strains, and adapts, revealing the vulnerability and physical labor that club culture often asks performers to conceal. 

When I presented Espai Segur, I was exploring safe spaces in clubs, thinking about how to create them, seeing if they are even possible or if they are just a utopia. I think the club scene is one of the ways I feel you can have the most impact, where you can question, generate thought about how we create community, or how we want the clubbing to be.

Safe Amorx, the awareness team de Soto is part of, is operating in that same ethos. Their manifesto states: "The club embodies us. When you set foot in it, you become a part of it. Your actions create, sustain, and participate in the collective atmosphere. You carry that responsibility." It is a vision of the club as a site where something is continually and collectively being made.  

While de Soto's performances foreground forms of labor and safety, her visual language draws attention to another set of assumptions: the ones attached to femininity. De Soto's aesthetic persona is hyperfeminine and meticulously constructed. It operates as both a personal history and a visual strategy.

I was so fascinated with femininity when I was a child — with the mythology of it. I have love for all things associated with femininity. But for me it's not necessarily about gender or normativity. It's more just a game. When I see another person expressing femininity from different genders and different approaches, I feel connected, like we are on the same path. It's unconscious in a way, but at the same time it's an affirmation when I understand it's something that so many people are also navigating.

This aesthetic persona and performance work share a commitment to the body as a site of knowledge, one that exceeds what language can hold. This is one of the convictions that most deeply underpins de Soto's practice.

Language is associated with this rational, hegemonic masculine point of view in life. It is important to defend the idea that there's an intuition, a knowledge, that you cannot say through words—it's deeper than words. In my work, I always start with something more rational. But then I forget what I read or what I saw, and let it be in my body. I work more from intuition, with this learning that I can just let things be. And your body is much more intelligent than your brain. Sometimes you find ways with your body, and you wonder how.

De Soto is now beginning a residency at Hangar, Barcelona's center for artistic research. It will be the first time she has worked formally within a visual arts institution, and the first time her practice has been supported as an extended process rather than culminating in a single performance or broadcast. She plans to continue what she calls her "sound and body investigation," now within a setting that makes room for slower forms of research and collaboration.

As her practice moves into new contexts, the residency offers a different kind of visibility and creates space for the research to unfold—slowly, collaboratively, without a fixed destination—which is, in the end, precisely how de Soto works: the deriva applied to a practice.