Selwa Abd (Bergsonist) is a Moroccan-born, New York–based interdisciplinary artist, composer, and design researcher whose practice spans sound, performance, and time-based media. 
A recipient of the Issue Project Room Residency (2022), the Harvestworks Technology Immersion Program Grant & Fellowship (2022), the Jerome Hill Artist Alternate Award (2023), the NYFA x Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Women Fund Grant (2024), and the NYSCA x Roulette Artist Grant (2025), 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. Her practice has been recognized by The Washington Post, BOMB Magazine, GQ, Resident Advisor, Mixmag Mena, NPR and Artforum. 

Her work engages the reconfiguration of archival material — found sounds, processed sounds, and live video — into immersive audiovisual environments. Drawing on electroacoustic and musique concrète traditions and informed by Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Henri Bergson, she employs electronics, DIY instruments, and granular and spectral techniques to examine postcolonial identity, techno-futurism, and the psychological effects of virtuality in contemporary culture. 

Intuition serves as both a critical and operative framework throughout her practice. In performance, her work blurs distinctions between the real and the virtual, proposing speculative temporalities while confronting the tensions of the present.

Her recent projects 
— including ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ and As If Reality — expand her sonic practice into more complex archival and visual frameworks, drawing on her background in design. 
She has collaborated extensively across contemporary art and experimental music contexts, and has produced remixes for artists including Depeche Mode. 

Her discography spans over a decade, comprising more than 7 albums, 15 EPs, and numerous featured releases on labels including Optimo Music, Columbia Records, Dark Entries and Tresor Records.

Abd is equally committed to community infrastructure and curatorial work. She is the founder of Pick Up The Flow, an NYC-based community resource for artists, and BIZAARBAZAAR, an independent publishing imprint. 

She has been an NTS Radio DJ resident since 2018 and has curated music and events for projects including 3afak and various label compilations. She has also hosted and produced the PUTF podcast, featuring interviews with artists, curators, and creatives. Her curatorial practice is an ongoing and integral dimension of her work.

She has been invited to speak about her practice at Moogfest, MoMA PS1, and New Inc’s Demo Festival, and has served as a guest in classes at The New School, CalArts, and Pratt.

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ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ, 2025
ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is an ongoing 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)




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. She is now actively extending ASL across new performance contexts, residencies, and exhibition formats, growing the sonic and visual archive that took root in Morocco.