In June 2021, while resident at Millay Arts, I focused on work conceptually inspired by the famous Madeleine passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. My own relationship to this writing is couched in forced isolation in the COVID moment, and the ensuing reflection that follows; as well as family history with dementia, coming to grips with what can be remembered in the short versus long term. I have posed myself the following questions:

● Without our memory in the short term, what is our lived experience of the present that we can document (field recording, video, sketching)?

● Can we use all our senses to take a mental snapshot of our present states (“multisensory mnemonics”)?

● How do we draw on our past to describe our identities, without being consumed by that alone (depression)?

● How do we calculate our future selves without being consumed by the given barriers (anxiety)?

● Can we trigger our own memories actively, where the madeleine (art object) itself may not have
the same effect twice?

● Can the arts be therapy (in a time when traditional therapy is overwhelmed with patients, and most organic social channels are closed)?

The first iteration of this resultant modular work is “solo” in the loosest sense – I perform all the instruments on a recording or live performance, and have live audio processing, studio and musique concrète techniques at my disposal. The process would focus on learning phrase fragments and improvising them with additive/subtractive sub-processes, much like the process of deconstructing a learned solo for acquiring fluency in a musical “language.”