Inga Huld Hákonardóttir & Yann Leguay - no lemons no melon

At the crossroads of performance and sound, Inga Huld Hákonardóttir and Yann Leguay reflect on the meanings of amplification. Drawing from pop culture as well as conceptual art, they interrogate the compulsive endeavour for increasingly efficient communication.

no lemons no melon echoes a thirst for silence and its elusiveness. Despite or through the noise, how can we find the silence we need to unwind? What does that silence look like, and does it exist at all? In a performance that makes sound visible and silence audible, Inga and Yann seek to create a still point in a chaotic world that constantly inundates our senses with stimuli.

The work of Inga Huld Hákonardóttir is situated in the field of performance and choreography and on occasion branches into music/ concert. Her work generally focuses on seeking friction between the symbolic and the sensorial. Inga graduated from the P.A.R.T.S, Brussels in 2014 and has been working in the field of performance, with a home base in Brussels since.

Ingas most recent performance work Neind Thing proposes a quest for nothingness through forms of positive rejection as reaction to an omnipresent overload and overstimulation. Nothingness as a practice for elimination, as a dance, as a symbol and a ritual for 3 performers, a percussionist and a light designer all equally present on stage.

Her work Again The Sunset was made in collaboration with artist and musician Yann Leguay and proposes new materials as instruments such as axes logs and tonal stones creating both a laborious and sonic engagement with the materials. Voice, body and object have a rather equal importance in this work and these elements weave into each other to create a whole. This work exists in different versions and has cracked its way into the noise music scene being presented in multiple radical and renown music festivals such as LUFF (Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival) and Sonic Protest, Paris and other cities.

Inga collaborates extensively with choreographer Rósa Ómarsdóttir; and their works also play on a ground where the hierarchy of body, object and sound produciton is blurred. Their first artistic collaborations Wilhelm Scream was a sound study, based on Foley sound technique for cinema where the relationships between image, movement and sound production appears in humorous and uncanny results. This work later became a basis for their work The Valley where the notion of the uncanny valley became more apparent. Rósa and Inga received the Gríman award as choreographers of the year in 2017 for the Valley. Their latest work together, Da Da Dans, was a commission for The Icleandic Dance Company in celebration of the Dada movements 100th anniversary.

Inga also collaborated with choreographer Katie Vickers. Their work Slogan for Modern Times was based on their interests in monstrosity and the temporality of the sublime. This work initially was created as a graduation work but became an evening long performance performed in Monty and De Singel, Antwerpen. Later Katie and Inga collaborated again on another performance with Rebecka Stillman, We Will Have Had Darker Futures, which is based on the temporalities of fear and hope.

Inga also performs in works of other authors and has worked with artists such as Phia Ménard, Salva Sanchis, Eleanor Bauer, Erna Ómarsdóttir, Veli Letovahra, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Gabel Eibens.

Yann Leguay lives and works in Brussels. He focuses on the notions of dematerialization, the use of interfaces and everything about the materiality of memory. In his sound practice he was defined as a 'media saboteur' by the Consumer Waste label, seeking to fold the sound materiality in on itself using basic means in the form of objects, videos and performances. He has presented his work in many places and festivals all around Europe and further such as Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Club Transmediale, Centre Pompidou, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual.

Since 2007, he is also producing installations, sculptures and editions that integrate a critical approach to the meaning of the technological evolution.

In concerts he pushes the boundaries of accepted norms of audio behavior, using uncommon machineries for the playback of audio media: opened hard-drives as turntables, an angle grinder as a microphone, the sound of the electricity and so on… His records release activity is equally unusual, releasing readable silkscreen records, a 7” single without a central hole, or a record composed from recordings of vinyl being scratched by scalpel. His Phonotopy label proposes a conceptual approach to recording media and he curates the DRIFT series on the Artkillart label.

He is also involved in different collective projects as sound and music curator, and participates to graphical designs for books and revues.