VestAndPage

Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage internationally in performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing and temporary artistic community projects. For over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, artistic research and curatorial projects. They have produced performance-based art and films among others under Antarctic glaciers, at the Himalayan foothills, in the vastness of Tierra del Fuego, in military enclaves, or inside prehistoric caves systems. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their works have been presented at various sites and in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas worldwide. They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology and mentoring on collaborative performance and filmmaking in co-creation master classes and have been guest lecturers at art academies worldwide.

VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived psychogeographically in response to natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites and architectures. They are focused on the liminal, spectral and ritual nature of performance art, often in “thin places”: locations-in-between, where the veil between different temporalities, occurrences and stories is porous. To perform in these thresholds through an approach of queer and dark ecology where the visible blends with the invisible, they have developed a psychogeographical method to activate memory and uncover layers of information and imagery stored in the human body, psyche, spirit, and environment. They inquire about performance art as an urgency to explore the physical, mental and spiritual bodies, where moments of crisis see the crossing of boundaries by the break with norms and presumed orders, to interface with the ephemeral matter of art and existence.

Website https://www.vest-and-page.de/biography 

Instagram: @vestandpage 

Facebook: @VestAndPage  

For more on their filmmaking work see https://www.vest-and-page.de/filmography 

“Poetics of Relations: A Manifesto on Performance-based Filmmaking” (2020)

This manifesto expands upon the Poetics of Relations, the embodied research of VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes), which informs their performance-based filmmaking theory and practice. Since 2010, the artist duo inquires into the pillars that constitute the cross-contamination of the two art forms of time-based live art and filmmaking. Their films have been produced geo-psychologically in a variety of locations around the world: from the remote regions of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego to the Antarctica; from socio-cultural areas of conflict like Kashmir and North-West India to the volcanic island of Formentera; and during a month-long performance walk through Germany, Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. 

Each of the films focuses upon a particular research and artistic subject. In this video article, their film projects are taken under the pinhole to look into what could constitute a manifesto of sorts in which the embodied research process identifies the essentials constituents of their practice, and elaborates on the integration of filming, story, time, space, character, action, objects, text, sound, effects, atmosphere, production and editing.

The manifesto was published by the Journal of Embodied Research, 3(1), 2020, (26:55).