Images of the event (Instagram)

Photo Gallery ©CC Convent de Sant Agustí

The Institut de Cultura (IUC), in collaboration with the Sant Agustí Convent Civic Center, is organizing the second session of the In fieri: Translating Images series next Wednesday, April 30th (7:30 PM), dedicated to artistic research in the field of sound creation.

In fieri: Translating Images

Session II. A Sonic Journey Inside the Convent

Performances by Tomer Damsky and Marc O'Callaghan at the Convent de Sant Agustí

Wednesday April 30th – 7:30 PM – C. C. Convent de Sant Agustí (Pl. Acadèmia, Born)
Free Entry

Composer Tomer Damsky seeks to translate the sonic experience of 16th-century Castilian Carmelite cloisters—not to reproduce their music, but to intervene in it from the present—and takes us into the depths of the San Agustín Convent, at sea level, to perceive the fluidity of the voice. Artist Marc O’Callaghan traces the shapes and iconography of the capitals and vault keystones of the cloister and chapels, searching for an auditory vocabulary that materializes as machine music. Damsky and O’Callaghan approach premodern ways of thinking and living, intertwining literary, sonic, and visual matter in their creative practices. The sound experiments of these two artists form a diptych on their ways of translating and reinventing the Western religious tradition. Can monastic communities be conceived as first-rate centers of linguistic and artistic experimentation? How are voice, body, and space transformed when engaging with the languages and rituals of rhythms carved into the stone of a capital or the popular vitality of a Baroque devotional song? How can novelty, wonder, and the unexpected—and with them, hope—be conjured today?

Tomer Damsky

Composer, performer, sound artist, and nomadic choir director, currently based in Montseny. She works in the realms of early music, folk, pop, metal, drone, experimental composition, and multimedia performance. She combines voice, sound recordings, electronics, and improvisation, seeking, for example, those rare moments that can, as if by a miraculous act, turn into a dramatically synchronized action. She is also a predoctoral researcher in the field of historical sound studies (Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, Orpheus Institute in Ghent, and Ruusbroec Institute in Antwerp). She holds a master's degree in musicology and has a deep interest in the sonic potential of music and liturgy. Her current project involves developing a vocal composition method inspired by the spiritual literature of the 16th-century Castilian Carmelites, led by Teresa of Ávila.

Marc O'Callaghan

Multidisciplinary artist focused on the issue of symbolic correspondences. He develops work at the crossroads of art, music, poetry, and conceptual speculation. His artistic practice is characterized by the ability to overlay and intertwine layers of seemingly disconnected, meaningful realities, revealing hidden connections through symbolic, formal, or referential correspondences. As a sound artist, he has undertaken the COÀGUL project, functional and speculative music, with which he has released four LPs and performed at Sónar, LEM, CCCB, and MACBA, as well as at festivals in other European countries. Among other projects, he engages with the images of Christian or secular tradition present in the buildings of the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona and interprets them following the musicological principles of Marius Schneider, translating them into machine music.