The Queer Art of Failure

Failure can be an attitude.
Failure can be a strategy.
Failure, perhaps,
can be an art form.

J. Jack Halberstam’s idea of failure as a queer, productive, and transformative strategy inspires this project. Imperfection, instability, and non-linearity appear here not as deficits, but as artistic procedures that undermine expectations of mastery, progress, and coherence. In collaboration with students of the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg, the performance creates a space in which composers and performers work across media and consciously allow the unpolished, the provisional, and the fragile. A sonic and performative field in which queerness becomes method: through disruption, reinterpretation, and persistent attempts that fail, shift, and begin again.

For Eloain Lovis Hübner, repurposing instruments is a lived experience.. Their work asks what it means to “queer” musical instruments and their grammar. During their own gender transition, these questions became concrete: while retraining their voice, dey found themself in a practice familiar to many trans people – a conscious deviation from what “normal” sound production is supposed to be, navigating tension, control, and loss of control. Failing. Continuing anyway. Their new composition for Ensemble Aventure transfers this experience onto instruments, accompanied by recorded sounds of tenderness, empowerment, and quiet defiance.

Laure M. Hiendl’s new compositions for solo clarinet and piano trio understand failure not as defeat, but as a productive process. Digital sampling techniques are translated into acoustic chamber music: a fragment is isolated, repeated, and displaced until communication falters and something new can emerge.

Programme:

Laure M. Hiendl (*1986)
for Piano Trio (2026)

Laure M. Hiendl (*1986)
for Clarinet Solo (2026) WP^*

Eloain Lovis Hübner (*1993)
doll*etudes (2026)
for amplified Ensemble and Tape

Love Carbin (*2002)
Åter, nära
for any number of instruments

Malin Bång (*1974)
palinode (2013)
for amplified Ensemble

Performances and interventions between the music pieces and partially in parallel

Ensemble Aventure:
Phoebe Bognár, Flute
Andrea Nagy, Clarinete
Akiko Okabe, Piano
Santiago Vilma, Percussion
Ioanna Boutaldaki, Violin/Viola (Guest)
Ellen Fallowfield, Violoncello
Beltrán González, Electronics and Conducting

With second-year students of directing, acting, dramaturgy, and motion design at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg (ADK Baden-Württemberg)

Admission: €20 / Reduced: €15
Free entry for school pupils, students & Freiburg Pass holders
Tickets available at the evening box office or via:
Verena.Fuchs@ensemble-aventure.de

A collaboration between the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Ensemble Aventure Freiburg, and Musik der Jahrhunderte, in cooperation with the Animation Institute of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

The compositions are made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.