Held on 07 mar 2019
Sarah Davachi will perform a concert for synthesiser in the Museo Reina Sofía, with approaches to her new album Gave in Rest, which, recorded in 2017 in Vancouver, largely explores timbre and space.
The quality of timbre can distinguish between a sound through the source emitting it: a piano, a car, dripping water, with its huge variety conducive to the possibility of being widely explored in the sounds created by both analogue and digital synthesisers. Davachi, however, crafts her music interchangeably on analogue instruments like the modular synth, with digital programmes for recording and editing, and with acoustic instruments such as the organ. In fact, her early interest in music saw her work with different keyboard instruments simultaneously, and on her last record she used a lute, a Mellotron, organs, piano, synthesiser and voice, as well as interpretations with double bass and violin.
Davachi’s fascination with investigating timbre has led to her interest in the foremost composers of the American and European tradition – Alvin Curran, La Monte Young, Èliane Radigue and Alvin Lucier — who have explored the spatial qualities of sound, while her own collaborations include Donald Buchla, Morton Subotnick, Aki Onda, Oren Ambarchi and Ellen Arkbro.
These collaborations have doubtlessly resulted in her study of timbre becoming something abstract, concerned with the way in which vibrations resonate with, or rather in, the listener. This focus on seemingly phenomenological aspects of sound evokes the introspective, almost intrinsic and necessary, capacity of contemplative listening, her album Gave in Rest seeking to share a solitary meditation, a way of perceiving space in its historical scope. It was no accident that Davachi devised the work in a period in which she ensconced herself in European churches to listen to organs and bells. Yet in a modern-day context it becomes hard to associate the timbre of those two monumental instruments with calm and rest. Bells and organs, in their journey to the north of the American continent over 350 years ago, were at the centre of a fight against demonic noises in the forest, but today the places around sanctuaries have changed on both sides of the ocean to such an extent that forests and temples – two barely accessible locations – are craved for their isolation, for their proximity to nature and spirituality.
This concert by Sarah Davachi is set out as a request for asylum, a strategy to combat the unease of solitude imposed by the rhythm of production, over-exposure and information overload, and their encroaching pervasion of today’s society.
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo
With the technical support of
The Laboratory of Computer and Electronic Music (LIEM), the Centre of Performance Technology (CTE), the National Institute of Performance Arts and Music (INAEM)
Related documents
Jordan Reyes, “On Gave in Rest, Sarah Davachi Explores Cathedral Music Through An Atheistic Lens”, en Bandcamp Daily, 14 September 2018
Stewart Smith, “Sarah Davachi: The Canadian synthesist needs a little space”, in The Wire, no. 408, February 2018
Cris Cole, interview with Sarah Davachi, in Personal Best Fanzine for Noise, Music and Arctic Cod, no. 7 August 2017
David Hendy, "Colonist", Noise, BBC, 2015 (on bells and organs in North America)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.