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Rosalía

ROSALÍA — LUX / HAGIOGRAPHY, LANGUAGE & MYSTICAL POP

WHY ROSALÍA BELONGS IN POP CULTURE & MUSICAL INDUSTRY

Rosalía belongs in this branch because her albums repeatedly operate as more than collections of songs. Her work progressively treats the album as a total artistic construction in which voice, music, body, image, choreography, fashion, language, narrative, historical research and performance are organised as one artistic system.

With LUX this reaches a particularly radical stage. The fourth album does not begin from the conventional logic of contemporary pop—single → hook → beat → visual campaign. Instead, Rosalía constructs an extended spiritual and dramaturgical architecture drawing upon female mysticism, hagiography, opera, orchestral writing, liturgical music, flamenco, experimental pop, multiple languages, choirs, saints, poets, and philosophical/theological writing.

The resulting work tests whether the industrial apparatus of global pop can contain a form approaching:

ORATORIO + SONG CYCLE + HAGIOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE + SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY + POP ALBUM.

LUX — BASIC FACTS

LUX is Rosalía’s fourth studio album, released 7 November 2025. The complete physical edition contains 18 tracks, organised in four movements. The album was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Other voices and ensembles include Björk, Carminho, Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Escolania de Montserrat and Orfeó Català, among other collaborators.

The official presentation identifies its central themes as feminine mystique, transformation, spirituality, illusion, loss, faith and selfhood. Its musical world draws simultaneously upon orchestral composition, opera, sacred music, choir, flamenco, electronic production, hip-hop, pop and traditional music.

This is not simply stylistic eclecticism. The heterogeneous forms correspond to the album’s movement between:

LUX — CREATIVE PROCESS

Rosalía deliberately reversed her habitual working method. Normally: MUSIC → WORDS. For LUX: WORDS → MUSIC.

Before composing much of the musical architecture, she spent approximately one year concentrating primarily on writing lyrics, working substantially in isolation. She wanted to discover whether the work could emerge from language first.

After that initial year she spent approximately another year arranging, composing, returning to the lyrics, rewriting, refining, translating and preparing orchestration.

TEXT WAS NOT ADDED TO A MUSICAL WORLD. THE MUSICAL WORLD GREW AROUND THE TEXTUAL / SPIRITUAL RESEARCH.

RESEARCH BEFORE COMPOSITION — HAGIOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

A major source was hagiography. Rosalía immersed herself in accounts of female saints, mystics, religious women, poets, ascetics and spiritual teachers from different historical periods and religious traditions.

Figures include Hildegard von Bingen; Teresa of Ávila / Teresa de Jesús; Clare of Assisi; Joan of Arc; Rabi’a al-Adawiyya; Sun Bu’er; Ryōnen Gensō; Olga of Kyiv; Saint Rosalia of Palermo; Anandamayi Ma; Miriam; Vimala, and others. Literary and philosophical reading connected with the album includes Simone Weil and Clarice Lispector.

Approximately 15 of the 18 songs were inspired by female saints or mystical figures. These lives therefore belong to the generative research of the album, rather than being decorative religious iconography added after composition.

Hagiography as a pop compositional method

Traditional hagiography asks: How did this person become holy? LUX repeatedly transforms this into: What kind of extreme human act made this woman legible as holy?

The archive includes renunciation, celibacy, vision, revenge, self-disfigurement, poverty, martyrdom, ecstasy, solitude, rebellion, mystical love, rejection of marriage, death and rebirth.

Sainthood is not one moral ideal. Some figures are gentle, some violent, some erotic in their language of divine union, some reject family, some alter or punish their bodies, some become political leaders and some withdraw completely. The album produces not one model of the sacred but a constellation of female strategies for escaping the life society had prepared for them.

MYSTICAL FEMINISM

“Mystical Feminism” as analytical category. I do not claim that all these women historically belonged to a movement called Mystical Feminism.

But across many historical cultures, mystical women encounter a similar political problem: How can a woman claim authority in a system that does not normally authorise her to speak? Recurrent answers include vision, revelation, ascetic practice, divine calling and the body itself.

The mystical experience produces an alternative source of authority. Instead of “I speak because an institution authorised me,” the mystic may effectively say:

I SPEAK BECAUSE I SAW.
I SPEAK BECAUSE I HEARD.
I SPEAK BECAUSE I EXPERIENCED.

The body and the vision become authority.

Female mysticism without simple idealisation

Rosalía does not assemble only conventionally “pure” saints. She is fascinated by contradictions within sainthood.

Olga of Kyiv is remembered in Christianity as a saint associated with conversion and Christianisation, while her historical legend also contains extraordinarily violent acts of revenge following her husband’s murder: MURDERER ↔ SAINT.

Vimala is remembered within early Buddhist literature as a woman associated with prostitution who later entered Buddhist spiritual life and became one of the female voices of the Therīgāthā. The archive destabilises PURE WOMAN / FALLEN WOMAN. Holiness appears as transformation, rather than pre-existing purity.

FOUR-MOVEMENT DRAMATURGY

MOVEMENT I — TRACKS 1–5

DEPARTURE / LEAVING / EXITING PURITY. The journey leaves an imagined state of purity and enters body, desire, violence, attachment and world.

MOVEMENT II — TRACKS 6–9

GRAVITY / BEING FRIENDS WITH THE WORLD / BEING FRIENDS WITH MUNDANE THINGS. Gravity is both physical condition and spiritual metaphor: what keeps the body attached to Earth. GRAVITY = INCARNATION + WORLD + DESIRE + MATERIAL EXISTENCE.

MOVEMENT III

GRACE / BEING FRIENDS WITH GOD. The question becomes how another relationship to divinity might become possible after worldly experience.

MOVEMENT IV

FAREWELL / RETURNING HOME. Return does not restore the innocence from which the work began. The subject has travelled through love, world, violence, loss, desire, God and death. The structure is circular but not repetitive:

DEPARTURE → WORLD → GRACE → RETURN.

CENTRAL SPATIAL DRAMATURGY

LUX organises spiritual experience spatially:

EARTH ↕ HEAVEN

Its conceptual problem is: How can one love the world and love God? How can one move from Earth to Heaven and return?

The album negotiates ascent, descent, gravity, fall, transcendence and return. Spiritual states are organised through space, body, movement, weight and direction, not merely psychological ideas.

LANGUAGE AS EMBODIMENT

Sources describe LUX as using either 13 or 14 languages, the discrepancy resulting from different counting methods. The safest formulation is:

LUX uses approximately 13–14 languages, with 14 distinct languages appearing when Spanish and Catalan are counted separately.

Documented languages include Spanish, Catalan, English, German, Arabic, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian and Ukrainian.

Rosalía does not speak all of these languages fluently. The writing required writing, initial translation, consultation with speakers and professional translators, phonetic correction and repeated rewriting. In some cases she initially experimented through machine translation before sending material to professional translators.

A translation moved backwards and forwards until meaning + phonetics + rhythm + meter + vocal possibility worked simultaneously. The question was not simply whether a sentence was correct; it also had to sound right. Language becomes vocal material.

For the French sections of “Jeanne,” Charlotte Gainsbourg gave linguistic suggestions. Other speakers and collaborators helped correct pronunciation, syntax and musicality. Multilingualism is therefore collaborative vocal research.

Language as embodiment

LUX does not simply translate stories of different mystics into Spanish. Rosalía moves her own voice toward their languages. The singer physically learns new mouth positions, consonants, vowels, rhythms, accents and relationships between breath and text.

HAGIOGRAPHY → LANGUAGE → MOUTH → BREATH → VOICE → BODY.

The research enters Rosalía’s physiology.

Partial non-understanding

Almost no listener understands all the languages. Semantic comprehension is deliberately destabilised. Language may be received first as rhythm, timbre, consonant, breath, melody and vocal gesture—closer to opera, liturgy and sacred chant, where one can be emotionally and physically affected without understanding every word.

LANGUAGE DOES NOT ONLY TRANSMIT INFORMATION. LANGUAGE PRODUCES EXPERIENCE.

TRACK / MYSTIC / LANGUAGE MAP

Most individual songs remain here in Notes rather than becoming visible Thoughts.

MOV I

1. SEXO, VIOLENCIA Y LLANTAS — Spanish. No single female saint is securely identified as its exclusive model. Functions as prologue, introducing Earth/heaven, worldly experience/divine aspiration. Sex, violence and tires/road/material motion begin an album called LUX — Light: the sacred journey begins inside materiality.

2. RELIQUIA — Spanish. Inspired by Saint Rose of Lima. The relic is what remains when the sacred body is no longer completely present. Rosalía’s fragments of life, travel and loss become: LIFE → LOSS → REMAINS → RELIC. The self is fragments distributed across places, lovers, memory and travel.

3. DIVINIZE — Catalan and English. No single saint should be assigned without a reliable later source. The desire for human/divine transformation becomes explicit; the word collapses divinity and process.

4. PORCELANA — Spanish, Latin and Japanese. Inspired by Ryōnen Gensō, the Japanese Zen Buddhist nun whose hagiographic story says she disfigured/burned her face so beauty would no longer prevent access to spiritual practice. BEAUTY → OBJECTIFICATION → OBSTACLE → SELF-DISFIGUREMENT → SPIRITUAL ACCESS. Porcelain suggests beauty, smoothness, fragility, purity and immaculate surface; the myth breaks the image society wants to look at.

5. MIO CRISTO PIANGE DIAMANTI — Italian, with some sources identifying a short English element. Inspired by Clare of Assisi, invoking the devotional world around Clare and Francis. Intimacy is reorganised through devotion, poverty and spiritual relation rather than possession. Italian shifts the voice toward lauda, sacred song and operatic/devotional register. TEARS → DIAMONDS: suffering becomes precious matter.

MOV II

6. BERGHAIN — German, Spanish and English. Major inspirations: Hildegard von Bingen and Vimala. Collaborators: Björk, Yves Tumor and the London Symphony Orchestra. This is the central song for the connection with Mystical Feminism and Hildegard.

7. LA PERLA — Spanish. Do not force a saintly correspondence. It belongs to the worldly/gravitational movement and retains mundane, emotional and interpersonal life.

8. MUNDO NUEVO — Spanish. Based on traditional material. The desire for a new world continues the movement from one mode of existence into another.

9. DE MADRUGÁ — Spanish and Ukrainian. Inspired by Olga of Kyiv. Her hagiographic memory contains revenge and violence followed by conversion and sainthood: REVENGE → VIOLENCE → CONVERSION → SAINTHOOD. This rejects feminine holiness as passivity, meekness or innocence. Ukrainian materially connects the song to Olga’s historical/geographical world.

MOV III

10. DIOS ES UN STALKER — Spanish. “God” and “stalker” collapse theological vocabulary into contemporary slang/digital language. Mystical calling becomes a presence that refuses to leave the subject alone—almost pursuit.

11. LA YUGULAR — Spanish and Arabic. Inspired by Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, especially the idea of loving God for God’s own sake, neither from fear nor for paradise. DIVINE LOVE WITHOUT TRANSACTION. Arabic carries a philosophical/spiritual position rather than decorative colour. The world can fit inside me and I can fit inside the world.

12. FOCU ‘RANNI — Spanish and Sicilian. Inspired by Saint Rosalia of Palermo, with the connection to Rosalía’s own name. Her story includes rejecting expected marriage for spiritual life: EXPECTED MARRIAGE → REFUSAL → WITHDRAWAL → REDEFINED LIFE. Focu ‘ranni means approximately great fire/big fire and can evoke an extreme or difficult situation. The myth connects failed/abandoned marriage, renunciation, freedom and spiritual self-definition.

13. SAUVIGNON BLANC — Spanish. Inspired by Teresa of Ávila / Teresa de Jesús. Her mysticism works through interiority, ecstasy, union, desire for God and transformed consciousness. Divine union becomes sensation. Key question: Can desire change object without ceasing to be desire? Earthly desire may be redirected toward divine union.

14. JEANNE — Spanish and French. Inspired by Joan of Arc. Her myth joins voice, vision, politics, war and martyrdom: A YOUNG WOMAN HEARS VOICES → CLAIMS THEM AS AUTHORITY → ENTERS POLITICAL/MILITARY HISTORY → IS CONDEMNED → BURNED. Authority derives not from age, institution, education or male authorisation but from “I heard.” French moves Rosalía’s mouth toward the mythology she inhabits.

MOV IV

15. NOVIA ROBOT — Spanish, Mandarin and Hebrew. Inspired by Sun Bu’er and Miriam. The robot girlfriend represents manufactured femininity: a body built to please, obey, adapt and satisfy expectation.

Sun Bu’er: Chinese Taoist master whose hagiographic tradition describes damaging/disfiguring her face to avoid harassment because of beauty, and leaving conventional family structure for Taoist life. BEAUTY → SOCIAL DANGER/OBSTRUCTION → SELF-ALTERATION → FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT → SPIRITUAL PATH. The robot’s body is perfected for the male gaze; Sun Bu’er’s is altered to escape it.

Miriam: prophetess of the Hebrew Bible, providing female leadership, prophetic voice, rebellion and collective movement. The song moves from manufactured obedient woman toward women who refuse the social role assigned to them.

The three languages produce operatic polyphony: Spanish = contemporary satire/commodity femininity; Mandarin = Sun Bu’er; Hebrew = Miriam. Sisterhood is not sameness; it is coexistence.

16. LA RUMBA DEL PERDÓN — Spanish. No specific saintly source should be forced. Forgiveness enters rumba: a theological concept becomes dance/music and physical rhythm.

17. MEMÓRIA — Portuguese and Spanish, with Carminho. Memory enters the final movement of farewell and return. The Portuguese voice gives the album another geographic and musical body.

18. MAGNOLIAS — Spanish. Inspired by Anandamayi Ma, Indian spiritual teacher/mystic. Death is imagined through flowers, return, celebration and cosmic belonging. FUNERAL → RETURN. The magnolia is a material image of transition: BODY → DEATH → DUST → COSMOS/RETURN.

BERGHAIN — HILDEGARD & VIMALA

The title as dramaturgical trap

“Berghain” evokes the Berlin techno club, creating expectations of techno, club and electronic music. Instead the song arrives through aggressive orchestral and operatic architecture: an intentional bait-and-switch.

Rosalía also considered the German word: Berg = mountain; Hain = grove/wood, suggesting a mountain grove or forest of thoughts in which one can become lost. The title contains club and forest, urban ecstasy and mystical landscape, techno and vision.

Hildegard

Rosalía explicitly connects “Berghain” to Hildegard von Bingen, describing Hildegard’s visions as experiences that seemed to pierce her mind/brain. Rosalía chose German because of Hildegard: HILDEGARD → GERMAN → ROSALÍA’S VOICE.

Vimala

Vimala’s movement from prostitution/worldly sexual identity toward Buddhist religious life again chooses a sacred figure whose holiness does not begin from conventional purity: SEXUALISED WOMAN → SPIRITUAL VOICE. This complicates sex/sainthood.

Musical violence and vocal positions

Rosalía describes “Berghain” as the album’s most violent moment. The orchestra behaves as pressure, surge, mental overload, threat and ecstasy. Pure rage can become ecstatic; violence and mysticism are not simple opposites.

The three principal voices function as dramaturgical forces:

Religious ecstasy and club ecstasy both contain repetition, loss of ordinary self, physical intensity, sound, collective force and altered consciousness. The issue is not church = sacred and club = profane, but: What bodily technologies allow a person to move beyond the ordinary self?

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN — CENTRAL ANALYTICAL CROSS-LINK

Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, writer, theological author and leader of a women’s monastic community. Her artistic practice collapses boundaries between vision, text, image, music, body, theology and community.

She is a historical precedent for the transdisciplinary mystical construction that LUX reactivates within popular culture. This is an analytical comparison, not an equation between historical contexts.

Scivias — vision becomes multimedia knowledge

Scivias (“Know the Ways”) was written roughly between 1140 and the 1150s. Its structure combines visions, theological explanation, visual imagery and music. The manuscript illustrations function as visual exegesis, not mere decoration.

Hildegard’s revelation exists simultaneously as seen, heard, written and sung. Mystical experience requires multiple media to become transmissible.

Vision authorises the woman

A medieval woman inside a patriarchal ecclesiastical structure could not simply claim theological authority as a male cleric might. Vision provides another route:

I SAW + I HEARD → THEREFORE I MUST SPEAK / WRITE.

Vision generates authority. This is one of the strongest historical foundations for Mystical Feminism as Clarisse uses the category.

Ordo Virtutum — mysticism becomes performance

Ordo Virtutum, completed around 1152, is a sung Latin dramatic work associated with Hildegard’s female monastic community at Rupertsberg. Its conflict involves Anima (the Soul), the Virtues and the Devil. The spiritual journey is personified, sung, spatially organised and performed by bodies: theology becomes performance.

The Devil cannot sing

In Ordo Virtutum, the Virtues and Soul sing; the Devil does not sing, but speaks/shouts. Harmony belongs to the divine order. Moral/spiritual difference is produced through vocal form: good and evil have different sonic ontologies. Spiritual ideas become compositional rules.

Lingua Ignota

Hildegard produced Lingua Ignota (“Unknown Language”) and Litterae Ignotae (“Unknown Letters”). The surviving Lingua Ignota contains approximately 1,000 invented words, largely embedded within Latin structures. Its exact function remains debated; it may have had spiritual, communal, symbolic or specialised functions.

Important: Do not claim that Rosalía based LUX’s multilingualism on Lingua Ignota. There is no evidence for that direct influence. The relation is an analytical resonance only.

Hildegard ↔ Rosalía: the mystical problem produces a linguistic problem

Hildegard: ordinary Latin → new words / unknown language.

Rosalía: native Spanish/Catalan → multiple foreign languages.

The formal strategies are historically different, but both suggest that ordinary language may be insufficient for the experience being described. Language must be expanded, displaced or estranged.

For Hildegard: invent language. For Rosalía: move between languages. THE MYSTICAL PROBLEM PRODUCES A LINGUISTIC PROBLEM.

Music as theological knowledge

Hildegard’s theology, visions and music are structurally interconnected. Scivias culminates partly through song; Ordo Virtutum turns spiritual struggle into sung action; her chant repertory connects liturgy, vision, community and theology. Music is not sound added to religious text; it becomes a mode of theological knowledge.

The central synthesis

Hildegard does not simply write about visions. Vision generates text, image, music, drama, language and community.

Rosalía does not simply write songs about mystical women. Hagiographic research generates language, voice, orchestration, album structure, vocal positions and musical form.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE BECOMES A GENERATIVE ARTISTIC SYSTEM.

Hildegard is a 12th-century Benedictine abbess within Christian monastic life. Rosalía is a 21st-century global pop artist inside the contemporary music industry. The value lies in the distance: a device embedded in monastic liturgy returns inside global pop.

HILDEGARD: vision → Latin / Lingua Ignota → chant → female monastic community → sacred drama.

ROSALÍA: hagiographic research → multiple languages → orchestral/pop composition → global recording → mass-distributed performance persona.

Do not formulate this as “Rosalía = modern Hildegard.” The question is: What happens when a female mystical mode of knowledge moves from the monastery into the pop industry?

ORCHESTRATION — THE LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The London Symphony Orchestra sessions lasted approximately 3–4 days, possible because orchestration had already been extensively prepared. Scores were written and instrumental decisions made. Rosalía describes the process as extremely precise, almost surgical. Instrumentation, dynamics and intention could still change, but the compositional architecture already existed.

ORCHESTRA ≠ ORNAMENTAL LUXURY. It is a designed dramaturgical system.

Throughout LUX, the orchestra behaves as thought, pressure, ecstasy, violence, grace and interruption. It is not a cinematic background. In “Berghain” it can overwhelm the human voice, staging the individual inside a force larger than the individual—appropriate to mystical experience.

FEMALE VOICES / SISTERHOOD WITHOUT ONE FEMALE ESSENCE

Important female voices include Björk, Carminho, Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz, alongside choirs and historical female mystical references.

Do not reduce this to “female empowerment.” Multiple women from different eras, languages, religions and musical practices coexist without becoming one homogeneous model of femininity.

FEMININE MYSTICISM ≠ ONE FEMININE ESSENCE. It becomes a POLYPHONIC ARCHIVE.

LUX AS A HAGIOGRAPHIC SAMPLER

LUX uses hagiography almost as pop music uses sampling—not sound alone, but a gesture, spiritual strategy, myth, biographical rupture, language, sacrifice, refusal, death or vision.

HISTORICAL WOMAN → MYTH / HAGIOGRAPHY → EXTRACTED GESTURE → LANGUAGE → ROSALÍA’S VOICE → CONTEMPORARY SONG.

This is not historical reconstruction. It is mythic recomposition.

Rosalía does not become the saints

Using Philip Auslander’s distinction between real person, performance persona and character with caution: Rosalía does not conventionally impersonate Hildegard, Joan, Rabi’a, Rosalia or Sun Bu’er. Their narratives temporarily enter her performance persona.

ROSALÍA REMAINS ROSALÍA WHILE ALLOWING ANOTHER HISTORICAL / MYTHIC FEMALE VOICE TO PASS THROUGH THE SONG.

The saint is not a character; the saint functions more like a vocal / ethical / mythic score.

From hagiography to performance score

MYTHOPOETIC DIMENSION

LUX is relevant to Clarisse’s wider mythopoetic research. Historical/mythic narratives become form-generating devices rather than stories used merely to illustrate.

MYTH → LANGUAGE → VOICE → MUSIC.

In Clarisse’s drawing practice: MYTH / DREAM → IMAGE → BODY → PERFORMANCE.

Keep this relation in Notes; no additional visible jump is required.

SACRED ↔ POPULAR

LUX refuses a clean border between sacred and popular:

Sacred material is contaminated by the present.

WHY THIS IS CONTEMPORARY RATHER THAN NEO-MEDIEVAL

LUX does not recreate medieval music, monastic life or historical saintliness. It uses mystical material to interrogate contemporary love, celebrity, gender, romantic failure, technology, commodified femininity, personal faith and global identity.

The saints do not let Rosalía leave the present. They provide alternative devices for reading it.

LUX AGAINST THE STREAMING ECONOMY

The album is long, orchestral, multilingual, conceptually interconnected, structured in movements and partly resistant to immediate semantic understanding. This works against streaming logic based on immediate hook, short duration, instant legibility and playlist interchangeability.

Individual songs can circulate, but the album asks to be encountered as a sequence. ALBUM FORM ITSELF BECOMES A RESISTANCE TO FRAGMENTATION.

POP INDUSTRY ↔ SPIRITUAL ATTENTION

Rosalía is not outside Sony/Columbia, global fame, streaming, fashion, celebrity or music video. She produces work about attention, spirituality, mystical women, renunciation and transformation from inside global pop.

The opposition is not pure mysticism versus corrupt pop. The question is:

Can a mass-mediated pop object create conditions for sustained attention, opacity and spiritual inquiry?

MYSTICAL FEMINISM — DEEP CONNECTION

The strongest connection is not merely that LUX references female saints. It is the recurring structure:

A WOMAN’S BODY IS ASSIGNED ONE SOCIAL MEANING. SHE DEVELOPS A PRACTICE THAT ALLOWS HER TO BECOME OTHERWISE.

Mystical practice becomes a technology for escaping an assigned identity.

Critical distinction: sacrifice

Do not romanticise bodily violence. Self-disfigurement, asceticism and martyrdom should not automatically become models of emancipation.

The productive contradiction is:

MYSTICAL PRACTICE MAY CREATE FREEDOM, WHILE THAT FREEDOM MAY STILL REQUIRE THE FEMALE BODY TO PAY AN EXTREME PRICE.

This connects subtly to Clarisse’s research around sacrifice: Is sacrifice still necessary for transformation? Keep this in Notes, not as another visible jump.

FINAL SYNTHESIS

The importance of LUX inside Pop Culture & Musical Industry is that it reverses the assumption that research and spirituality exist outside mass culture. Rosalía uses global distribution, celebrity, orchestra, multilingual production, collaboration, video, fashion and mass audience to produce an album generated through solitude, reading, hagiography, linguistic study, mysticism, sacred music and female spiritual history.

The contradiction remains unresolved:

GLOBAL POP STAR ↔ ASCETIC / MYSTICAL ARCHIVE.

The album neither becomes medieval religious music nor simply consumes religious imagery as decoration. At its strongest, LUX transforms mystical stories into compositional rules.

THE SAINTS ARE NOT THE SUBJECT OF LUX. THEY ARE PART OF ITS COMPOSITIONAL TECHNOLOGY.

Their languages, gestures, renunciations, visions, contradictions and forms of desire provide devices through which a contemporary pop body can be reorganised.

SOURCE BASIS

The supplied factual research is based on Rosalía’s official LUX album materials and credits; interviews concerning the four movements, spirituality, creative process, Hildegard von Bingen, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, Sun Bu’er and other mystical women; Vogue (2026), El País, Le Monde, Billboard / Zane Lowe and FADER interviews; academic research on Hildegard’s Scivias; Cambridge research on Ordo Virtutum and Hildegard’s female monastic performance practice; musicological research on Hildegard’s relation between vision, image, theology and music; and scholarship on Lingua Ignota.

Where explicitly identified above, relations to Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota, Clarisse’s mythopoetic practice and sacrifice are analytical connections, not claims of direct historical influence.

ROSALÍA / LUX ↔ DIMITRIS PAPAIOANNOU

Analytical connection only. No documented direct influence from Dimitris Papaioannou on LUX is claimed.

The connection joins two contemporary artistic practices that use myth, archive, body, image, material and transformation as generative devices rather than as subjects to illustrate.

WHY PAPAIOANNOU IS RELEVANT

Dimitris Papaioannou’s practice begins as much from visual art as from dance/theatre. Trained as a painter at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he has worked across painting, comics, performance, choreography, direction, scenography, costume, lighting and visual composition.

His stage works operate less like conventional narrative theatre than like images that become actions and actions that temporarily crystallise into images. Dreamlike environments bring human bodies into contact with raw materials; bodies fuse into hybrids; optical illusions emerge; art-historical references enter the stage; questions of human origins recur.

Papaioannou frequently controls concept, visualisation, direction, set, costume, lighting and sculptural composition. THE IMAGE IS NOT ADDED TO THE PERFORMANCE. THE IMAGE IS ONE OF THE SYSTEMS THAT GENERATES THE PERFORMANCE.

MYTH AS COMPOSITIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Neither artist treats myth as a story to retell:

MYTH → EXTRACT A FORCE / GESTURE / IMAGE / PROBLEM → TRANSLATE IT INTO THE MEDIUM → ALLOW A NEW WORK TO EMERGE.

Rosalía: hagiographic woman → gesture/spiritual strategy → language → voice → orchestration → song.

Papaioannou: myth/painting/archetypal image → physical principle → body → material → spatial action → living image.

MYTH IS NOT CONTENT. MYTH IS COMPOSITIONAL TECHNOLOGY.

PAPAIOANNOU — MYTH WITHOUT ILLUSTRATION

Papaioannou works with Greek mythology, Christian iconography, Renaissance painting and Western art history, but rarely as straightforward narrative adaptation. A reference may be fragmented, mutated, combined, made comic or grotesque, destroyed, rebuilt or allowed to disappear.

The spectator may recognise Sisyphus, Europa, the Minotaur, Venus, Medea, Christian imagery, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Magritte or El Greco without receiving a stable explanation of what they mean. These are cultural-memory fragments: they arrive, transform, collide and disappear.

His theatre functions almost like a moving Mnemosyne atlas, creating an analytical relation with Warburg, Agamben/Nymphs and mythopoetic visual arts.

ROSALÍA AND HAGIOGRAPHIC EXTRACTION

LUX does not narrate the complete lives of Hildegard, Ryōnen, Rabi’a, Joan, Sun Bu’er, Saint Rosalia or Olga chronologically. It extracts a force:

These fragments are recomposed through language, voice and musical form. Rosalía’s hagiography and Papaioannou’s mythological/art-historical archive therefore follow a comparable principle:

EXTRACT → DISPLACE → EMBODY → TRANSFORM.

STILL LIFE — SISYPHUS BECOMES MATTER

In Dimitris Papaioannou, Still Life (2014), the work develops from a meditation on Sisyphus without staging a conventional character or mythological reconstruction. It extracts labour, weight, repetition, matter, futility, endurance and the human need for meaning.

Performers carry, drag, lift, balance, assemble and break apart. Myth becomes a physical law:

SISYPHUS → WEIGHT; SISYPHUS → LABOUR; SISYPHUS → REPETITION; SISYPHUS → BODY CONFRONTING MATTER.

The myth is translated from narrative into dramaturgical condition.

This illuminates Porcelana: the song need not stage a Japanese monastery or impersonate Ryōnen Gensō. It extracts beauty → surface → obstruction → destruction of surface → transformation.

REMOVE THE ILLUSTRATION. KEEP THE FORCE.

THE GREAT TAMER — ARCHAEOLOGY AS DRAMATURGY

The Great Tamer (2017) is described through excavation: an exploratory journey, a search for hidden treasure and an inner archaeological excavation for meaning. Papaioannou speaks of burying metaphorical acts and digging them up again.

The excavation concerns identity, past, legacy, cultural memory and subconscious life. References to El Greco, Raphael, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Magritte and other visual histories behave as buried images returning through the body, not as an art-history lecture.

This suggests MYTHOPOETIC ARCHAEOLOGY: creation partly consists in excavating, reactivating, combining and allowing myths, memories, images, paintings, religious narratives and bodily gestures to mutate.

LUX can similarly be understood as HAGIOGRAPHIC ARCHAEOLOGY. Rosalía enters Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi, Jewish and Hindu archives, extracts resonant gestures and reactivates them in a 21st-century pop body:

PAST FEMALE BODY → MYTH / TEXT → CONTEMPORARY VOICE.

BODY AND VOICE AS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

Papaioannou’s bodies are fragmented, buried, revealed, reassembled, multiplied and hybridised. The body becomes an archaeological site through which images survive.

LUX creates a comparable process through voice. Rosalía’s mouth becomes temporarily inhabited by German, Arabic, Japanese, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, Sicilian, Latin, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Catalan, Spanish, English and Italian.

Papaioannou: BODY → MULTIPLE IMAGES.

Rosalía: VOICE → MULTIPLE LANGUAGES.

Neither medium remains singular.

TRANSVERSE ORIENTATION — LIGHT AS DRAMATURGICAL FORCE

Transverse Orientation (2021) creates a particularly strong analytical link to an album titled LUX. Its title refers to moths maintaining a fixed angle in relation to a distant light source. Onassis presents the work through light as orientation and invokes Rumi’s moth and candle.

Light is not decorative lighting; it becomes direction, attraction, orientation, desire and danger.

LUX similarly organises a directional spiritual movement: EARTH → WORLD → GRACE → RETURN. Light is not merely a religious symbol but an orientational principle:

The moth’s attraction may lead to burning. Likewise the mystical women in LUX orient toward God, vision, enlightenment and spiritual freedom, but the cost may include asceticism, social exclusion, martyrdom, self-disfigurement and renunciation.

LIGHT ≠ SAFE SALVATION. LIGHT CAN REQUIRE BURNING.

Orientation and sacrifice

ORIENTATION TOWARD LIGHT CAN BECOME A DRAMATURGY OF TRANSFORMATION. This preserves Clarisse’s question around sacrifice: what price does the body pay for the direction it chooses?

MYTHS BECOME FLUID

Transverse Orientation includes unstable figures evoking bull, Minotaur, Zeus, Europa, Venus, hybrid creatures, birth, death and regeneration. A bull may move from Minotaur to Zeus/Europa to another bodily configuration; human material may reorganise into animal, mythological figure, sculpture or monster.

MYTH DOES NOT HAVE ONE FIXED REFERENT. AN IMAGE CAN MOVE BETWEEN MYTHS.

This is relevant to LUX: Ryōnen and Sun Bu’er belong to radically different countries, centuries and traditions, yet resonate through the bodily problem of beauty → male gaze/social obstacle → alteration of the face → spiritual freedom. This reveals trans-historical formal resonance without claiming historical equivalence.

IMAGE AND SONG AS TEMPORARY STATES

Papaioannou’s tableaux resemble painting, sculpture, photograph, religious icon or anatomical drawing, but the image moves, collapses, breaks, reveals its mechanism and transforms into another image.

IMAGE IS A TEMPORARY STATE OF THE BODY.

A parallel formulation applies to LUX:

THE SONG IS NOT A CONTAINER ILLUSTRATING A SAINT. THE SONG IS A TEMPORARY STATE THROUGH WHICH THE MYTH CAN REAPPEAR.

Hildegard does not permanently “live” inside “Berghain.” A combination of German, orchestral pressure, voice, vision and ecstasy allows a Hildegardian force to appear temporarily.

THE SACRED IN THE MUNDANE

Onassis describes a recurring intention in Papaioannou’s work as revealing the sacred in the mundane. LUX performs a comparable contamination through Dios es un Stalker, Berghain, Sauvignon Blanc, Novia Robot and La Rumba del Perdón.

Sacred experience appears inside club culture, wine, technology, romantic relation, pop language and commodity culture—not only church, monastery or historical past.

Papaioannou likewise allows sublime art-historical images to coexist with crude material, jokes, naked bodies, banal actions and grotesque interruptions. Beauty can become absurd, the sacred physical, the monumental ridiculous. Both practices avoid museumifying the sacred.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ROSALÍA AND PAPAIOANNOU

Do not collapse their practices.

Rosalía works predominantly through voice, language, music, song and orchestration.

Papaioannou works predominantly through body, material, space, visual image, illusion and gesture.

ROSALÍA: MYTH → WORD → MOUTH → VOICE → MUSIC.

PAPAIOANNOU: MYTH → IMAGE → BODY → MATERIAL → SPACE.

There is also an important difference in semantic direction. LUX begins unusually from words, texts, languages and semantic research, moving LANGUAGE → SENSATION. Papaioannou often avoids explanatory language, embedding meaning in images, actions, materials and transformations, moving SENSATION / IMAGE → POSSIBLE LANGUAGE.

FORM DISCOVERED THROUGH PRACTICE

Papaioannou has described Transverse Orientation through “art is praxis,” resisting complete explanation before the work is finished. The work reveals itself through creation and extended rehearsal at Onassis Stegi.

Rosalía: research/writing → language → musical form.

Papaioannou: image/material/rehearsal → discovery → form.

Their methods differ, but in both form is discovered through practice rather than applied after an abstract concept.

CONNECTION TO MYTHOPOETIC VISUAL ARTS AND CLARISSE’S PRACTICE

Papaioannou demonstrates how drawing/painting logic can become performance logic. A visual composition becomes body arrangement, gesture, temporality, material encounter and optical illusion.

Clarisse: dream/myth/liminal image → drawing → body state → performance.

Papaioannou: art-historical/mythic image → tableau → body/material action → transformation.

Rosalía: mystical/hagiographic archive → text/language → voice → musical form.

All three demonstrate that image/myth can precede and generate embodied form.

HILDEGARD / PAPAIOANNOU / ROSALÍA

Keep this as conceptual synthesis in Notes, not as additional visible links:

The shared principle is:

NON-RATIONAL / SYMBOLIC / MYTHIC MATERIAL DOES NOT REMAIN PRIVATE IMAGINATION. IT IS GIVEN A FORM THAT CAN BE EXPERIENCED BY OTHER BODIES.

Hildegard’s image transmits a vision; Papaioannou’s known image destabilises recognition; Rosalía occupies the interval, beginning with known historical/mystical figures and transforming them through language, music and personal experience until they no longer function as simple biography.

MYTH AS SCORE

MYTH AS SCORE is the most economical concept connecting Rosalía, Papaioannou, Hildegard and Clarisse’s mythopoetic practice.

A myth provides constraints, images, gestures, forces, relations and transformations. The artist does not need to represent the myth; they can execute its logic in another medium.

IMPORTANT LINK DISCIPLINE

Do not classify Dimitris Papaioannou as a Mystical Feminist. The clean structure is:

Do not create direct links from Papaioannou to every saint, LUX track or myth. Detailed relations remain in Notes.

FINAL SYNTHESIS

The deepest connection among Rosalía, Papaioannou and Hildegard is not religion but how an invisible or inherited image becomes embodied form.

THE SYMBOLIC IMAGE IS NOT SOMETHING TO INTERPRET FROM A DISTANCE. IT IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE ENTERED, EMBODIED AND TRANSFORMED.