Residency at neimënster abbey

Visit the dedicated page on the neimënster abbey website. ●●●

I’m thrilled and proud to share that I have been accepted for a 12-week funded residency at neimënster abbey, a cultural center in Luxembourg City! The residency will be done over non-consecutive weeks from January-June 2026. I will be working on my novel-in-progress, Electriano, and carrying out research via interviews with jazz musicians and academics.

I will also be reading an excerpt from my work at neimënster’s “Embellie” event on May 17, 2026. (Visit the event webpage.)

More about the residency:

Our world is saturated with stories, news, discussions, and beliefs about “progress,” much of it absorbed in a narrative that equates technological “innovation” with the democratization of systems, better ecological practices, longer and happier lives, stronger consumer rights—in short, the betterment of society and the answer to everything.

However, given how much of this narrative is promulgated by the marketing departments of powerful companies that benefit from technology sales (and their entourages of support firms), it has become impossible to disentangle which technologies, and to which extent, benefit people rather than shareholders. More than anything, it’s troublesome that “progress” is so often defined in these narrow terms of technologization.

My work therefore looks at the nature of progress and seeks to challenge these narratives. What are alternative forms of “progress”? If you break technology away from its role as ubiquitous problem-solver, what do you get?

As a methodology for engaging with these questions, my writing uses sound, music, and music technology in science fiction scenarios. Sound itself presents a strange and uncanny set of ontologies, at least compared to the generally more accessible field of the visual. What is sound? Where does it go when you don’t hear it anymore? Sound and music are often associated with unknown realms, with “transporting” listeners to other places, with creating trancelike states that access deep memories and subconscious emotions. These elements, particularly inside the speculative worlds of science fiction, lead to rich possibilities with which to explore narratives that are antithetical to the cold linearity of technological progress.

The main focus of my residency at neimënster is a novel that turns on these themes. Through interviews with local jazz musicians and researchers, I will develop a unique vocabulary with which to create speculative musical technologies that can, in turn, be used as a weirding lens via which to see the financial systems and corporate gestures of today.