Selwa Abd, also known as Bergsonist, is a Moroccan-born, New York–based multimedia artist, composer, performer, and researcher. Her practice spans live performance, audio-video installation, sound composition, and recorded music.

Abd has received the Issue Project Room Residency, the Harvestworks Technology Immersion Fellowship, the Jerome Hill Artist Alternate Award, the NYFA x Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Women’s Fund Grant, and the NYSCA x Roulette Intermedium Artist Grant. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, Roulette, Moogfest, EKKO Festival, Mutek Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Amant, and the Brooklyn Film Festival. It has been covered by The Washington Post, BOMB Magazine, GQ, Resident Advisor, Mixmag Mena, NPR, and Artforum.

Her work reconfigures archival material (found sounds, processed sounds, and live video) into immersive environments and recorded music. Drawing on electroacoustic and musique concrète traditions, and informed by Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson, she works with electronics, DIY instruments, and signal processing, including granular and spectral techniques. Through these she examines postcolonial identity, techno-futurism, and the psychological effects of virtuality in contemporary culture. 
Intuition is both a critical and an operative framework in her practice, and her research in media theory uses sound as a lens on how time, memory, and perception are mediated by technology. In performance, she blurs the line between the real and the virtual, proposing speculative temporalities while confronting the tensions of the present.

Her recent projects, ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ and As If Reality, extend her sonic practice into larger archival and visual frameworks.

Her discography spans more than a decade, with over seven albums, fifteen EPs, and numerous features on labels including Optimo Music, Borft Records, Columbia Records, Dark Entries, and Tresor Records. She has also remixed artists including Depeche Mode and collaborated widely across contemporary art and experimental music.

Curation and community-building are integral to her work. Abd founded Pick Up The Flow, an NYC-based community resource for artists, and BIZAARBAZAAR, an independent publishing imprint.  She has been an NTS Radio resident since 2018, has curated events and label compilations, and hosts and produces the PUTF podcast, featuring conversations with NYC-based artists, curators, and creatives.

She has spoken about her practice at BEK, Moogfest, MoMA PS1, and has been a guest in classes at The New School, CalArts, and Pratt. 

She holds a BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design (The New School).





Short bio (~93 words):
Selwa Abd, aka Bergsonist, is a Moroccan-born, New York–based multimedia artist, composer/performer, and researcher. Working across live performance, audio-video installation, and recorded music, she reconfigures archival material into immersive environments, drawing on musique concrète and media theory to explore postcolonial identity, techno-futurism, and the psychological effects of virtuality in contemporary culture. 
Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, Roulette, MUTEK, and Sonic Acts, and released on Dark Entries, Optimo Music, and Tresor. She is the founder of Pick Up The Flow and BIZAARBAZAAR, and has been an NTS Radio resident since 2018.


Micro bio (~52 words):
Selwa Abd, aka Bergsonist, is a Moroccan-born, New York–based multimedia artist, composer/performer, and researcher. Her live performances, installations, and recordings reconfigure archival sound into immersive environments exploring postcolonial identity, techno-futurism and mediated perception. 
Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, Roulette and MUTEK, and released on Optimo Music and Dark Entries.





contact     cv    






@bergsonist
@selwaabd






             


    

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ, 2025
ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a multimedia archival project tracing Amazigh heritage, ancestral memory, and postcolonial identity through field recordings gathered in Selwa Abd's great-grandfather's village in Errachidia, southeastern Morocco.

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ has been supported by:
→  New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) x Roulette Artist Grant

→  NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre (NYFA x Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment)



ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ takes its title from the Arabic and Tamazight word for "origin" — أصل in Arabic, ⴰⵙⵍ in the script of the Amazigh people, indigenous to North Africa. The project began with Abd's return to her family's ancestral village near Errachidia, a region in southeastern Morocco where her family has lived for generations.

There, she gathered field recordings — conversations with villagers, ambient sounds from the region (a desert oasis near the Sahara dunes, a shrine and the sounds of stones from the quarry where her father once worked). She also documented inherited instruments belonging to her grandmother, the matriarchal core of the family. These recordings form the foundation of an expanding sonic and visual archive, developed across multiple formats and contexts.

The project is equally shaped by family history. Abd's grandfather was a trade unionist who organized mine workers and electricians during Morocco's resistance to French colonialism, helping establish training centers, healthcare units, and social housing. 
His legacy — alongside her grandmother's presence and her father's connection to the land — runs through the work as both subject and structural influence.

Rather than mere documentation, ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ pushes its source material into new spaces. Voices from the field recordings are manipulated into far-out textures. Acoustic samples of a bendir (frame drum) and qraqeb (iron castanet) appear alongside the polyrhythmic traditions of Gnawa and Chaabi music. The result is a portrait of her heritage filtered through Abd's electroacoustic practice — honoring a history while speculating toward a future.



Press

"Not only is the past a blurry thing, difficult to apprehend, but so is the future. Honoring her history as well as her own innovations in electronic music, Selwa Abd's ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a bridge between what's done and what's to come." — Rob Goyanes, CD Liner Notes

"ASL: صل ⴰⵙⵍ tells a genealogical story: not based on a linear chronology, but rather the way time folds in on itself to link the present to the past, demonstrating how present-day urban environments are shaped by a colonial past."
— Donna Lee Davidson, I Care If You Listen (American Composers Forum)

"The intentionality of every aspect — from the foods to the excavation of the material to the meticulous orchestration of multiple mediums — makes this ongoing project both educational and enlightening, disorienting and clarifying, all while remaining wholly intriguing."
— Donna Lee Davidson, I Care If You Listen (American Composers Forum)


In Navel Gazers #78, Selwa speaks with Andrew Ciccone about ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ — the field recordings gathered in her great-grandfather's village near Errachidia, the Amazigh heritage and family memory woven through the album, and what it means to reach back toward an inheritance that was never fully handed down. Read the full interview here.




Iterations

I. Live Performance: Premiered at Roulette, Brooklyn, NY — September 18, 2025 Commissioned by Roulette. Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Concert review by “I Care If You Listen” (American Composers Forum)

II. CD Album: ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ, 2025 
Art and music by Bergsonist. Liner notes by Rob Goyanes. Made possible by the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, facilitated by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts.


















Alongside her archival work, Abd has pushed into digital image processing and DIY printing, generating visual fragments that deepen the project's material presence.