Die Hörposaune (The Hearing Trombone)

a film/installation by Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl and Isabell Spengler, set in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro, DE 2022
single channel, 4K/DCP, 16:9, Surround Sound, 31 min.


Through a floating camera motion, the film invites us to enter a world with its own logic, passing through sensitive membranes, liquefied borders and openings between inner and outer spaces. Here we attend a reading circle or vocal performance in memory of the counter tenor and queer icon Klaus Nomi, one of the first public figures to die within the AIDS pandemic. Daydream-like, as if to save them from oblivion, the film delves into the guts of fantastical, queer body imaginations - with spit, panting, oral sounds, singing, and vulva-like paper flower arrangements, whereby anatomical representations are reinterpreted.

"A duet. Silent eye contact. Cue. The interpretation of a score from pop-up books with three-dimensional models of the body’s interior and of plants whose shapes, edges, transitions, and orifices are slowly captured by the interpreters’ fingertips and transformed into noises, sounds, melodies, rhythms, and bodily notations. They are getting under the skin, penetrating its layers, getting in touch with what usually remains hidden — the work of the organs and fluids inside the body, both human and vegetal, the transition from one physical state to another at the moment of digestion, breathing, photosynthesis: metabolization. ... Rigid boundaries — physical, medial, verbal, and mental — dissolve and enter into new alliances. The audiovisual duet generates no less than a new kind of language and, subsequently, new kinds of communication, perception, and reality." (Tasja Langenbach, Videonale.19, 2023)



directed by: Isabell Spengler, Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl
concept: Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl
co-concept: Isabell Spengler
set in a visual installation by: Nadia Lauro

with: Jule Flierl, Werner Hirsch
and: Gretchen Blegen, Carola Caggiano, Am Ertl, Nadia Lauro, Sharon Mercado Nogales, Nara Virgens

costumes: Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, Nadia Lauro
iSpheres: Plastique Fantastique - Yena Young & Marco Canevacci
light design: Gretchen Blegen
cinematographer: Bernadette Paassen
sound recordists: Claudia Matthei del Moro, S. McKenna
sound and technical manager: Carola Caggiano
production manager: Nara Virgens
catering: Matthias Halke

editor: Isabell Spengler
color grading: Till Beckmann
sound design and mix: Jochen Jezussek
title design: Franziska Morlok

music
with compositions by: Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, S. McKenna
"Song of the Cold Genius" by Henry Purcell (from King Arthur, 1684), in an arrangement by Christina Anger
text: "Die Luft- L'air, nécessaire à la vie" by Jean-Henri Fabre, 1857

administration: Alexandra Wellensiek / make up productions
internship: Am Ertl, Sharon Mercado Nogales
a production by make up productions in co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin with the support of Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte
The postproduction was supported by DIEHL+RITTER/ TANZPAKT RECONNECT, which is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR initiative.