The Queer Art of Failure

Malin Bång: palinode

for amplified ensemble

Natacha Diels: Princess Nightmare Moon

for violin, clarinet, piccolo, piano, percussion & electronics (2016)

Laure M. Hiendl: For Piano Trio
for viola, cello and piano (2026) ^WP*

Eloain Lovis Hübner: doll* etudes
for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, viola, cello and audio recording (2026) ^WP*

Ensemble Aventure

Failure can be an attitude. Failure can be a strategy. And perhaps failure can be an art form.

J. Jack Halberstam’s idea of failure as a queer, productive and transformative strategy inspired this project, in which imperfection, instability and non-linearity are treated not as flaws, but as conscious artistic methods that resist normative expectations of mastery, progress and coherence.

In collaboration with students from the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg, the performance explores contemporary practices in which composers and performers work across media–electronics, video, performance–and embrace the unfinished, the provisional and the fragile: a sonic-performative field in which queerness becomes a method–through disruption, reconfiguration and persistent attempts that fail, shift and emerge anew.

For Eloain Lovis Hübner, the repurposing of instruments is a lived experience. Her work explores what it means to ‘queer’ musical instruments and their grammar. During her own gender transition, these questions ceased to be theoretical: whilst retraining her voice, she found herself engaged in a practice familiar to trans people–the systematic rejection of what is supposed to constitute »normal« vocal use, the navigation of tension and loss of control. Failure. Carrying on. Her new composition for the Ensemble Aventure translates this experience into instruments, accompanied by recorded sounds of tenderness, empowerment and quiet defiance. Laure M. Hiendl’s new composition strings conceives of failure not as defeat, but as a productive process. Digital sampling techniques are translated into acoustic chamber music: a fragment is isolated, repeated and shifted until communication breaks down–and this breakdown opens up something new. Meanings remain in flux, and lingering within a single gesture creates a different logic of time: one that opens up alternative ways of experiencing and shaping time. Malin Bång’s »Palinode« and Natacha Diel’s »Princess Nightmare Moon« complete the programme–two works that, each in their own way, inhabit the same restless space: between attempt and dissolution, between form and its negation.