Held on 24 may 2019
Japanese artist and musician Tomoko Sauvage presents Hydromancy, a concert in which a set of her own instruments played in the darkness of the Museo’s Vaults Gallery and the use of water as sound material create, quite literally, an immersive experience. Unsurprisingly, her latest record Musique Hydromantique, released by Shelter Press in 2017, was conceived to be listened at night or at dawn, making use of the changes of audible perception that occur at that time, when people’s mechanical celerity has a shifting intensity and the activity of other animals is altered through temperature variations.
Sauvage admits that the naming of her pieces is an additional process that does not necessarily bear a relation to her sound experimentation. Thus Musique Hydromantique is a simple wordplay that mixes different references; to come upon the title, she firstly focused on the name of the second track on the album, Fortune Biscuit, in reference to the cookies that became popular in Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles. From there she moved on to the Japanese tradition known as omikuji, or fortune papers – fortune-telling paper strips drawn randomly, similar to that which occurs at Shinto shrines. Finally, there is a patent allusion to hydromancy, a method of water divination whereby the ripples, bubbles and colours of the element become an oracle.
To give form to the concert the artist has created a waterbowl instrument, made from a series of porcelain or glass bowls amplified through a hydrophone i.e. underwater microphones that pick up the movements and dripping water produced in the performance. The waterbowl is part of a reinterpretation of Jalatharangam or Jal tarang, a percussion instrument traditionally used in southern India and comprising a series of bowls filled with water at different levels, the edges of which are struck with wooden sticks. Sauvage became aware of the technique at an Aanayampatti Ganesan performance, led by her interest in Indian improvisation and pieces by North American composers Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane.
This reference is coupled with her growing and avowed fascination with underwater feedback, a term which describes the process of water ripples captured by hydrophones and carried outside the water in real time through speakers. The sound that comes out produces vibrations in the air of the surrounding environment, reverberating with the specific acoustics of the space and making the water surface vibrate. This rippling energy feeds back the loop as it occupies the circulating air and as it again comes into contact with the water and the hydrophones. Thus the audience is submerged in these water and air vibrations, immersed in a form of “subaquatic feedback”.
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)
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo
Related links
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Tomoko Sauvage is a Japanese musician and artist based in France who explores the sculptural capabilities of sound and improvisation in relation to the environment. She has developed her solo work with water in pieces such as Amniotic Life (2009) and Musique Hydromantique (2017).
![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.
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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.
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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.
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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.