VestAndPage

One Earth’s Dreaming | Performance

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One Earth’s Dreaming: Inside a gallery space a field of grass is installed. The male performer is covered by earth and grass shaping a hill. Flowers cover the field. A headset microphone transmits his breath continuously. The woman collects flowers one by one and stitches them with a twine to her hands. Labels and pencils are given to the spectators: they are requested to write a thought. They knot the labels on the dress of the woman and then shift away earth from the hill. When the male performer is freed from earth, he stands up, washes and dresses in a simple suit. The woman takes off her dress with the written wishes. They open a window inside the grass, revealing so a partly broken mirror underneath. They hand out pieces of the broken mirror to the visitors.


  1. *You have already turned to become true. While we remain still the same.

  Man to the Earth


* There is definitely the question of the communication process going on between the two performers Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes, and between them and the audience, a flow of energy and signs that is being transmitted between all participants, and who become a whole during the performance itself. One cannot be passive, cannot just sit and wait for everyone else to exorcise their fear of communication and hold back in the process of recreating unity. In the circumstance that VestAndPage create in their performance, the need to let go and do it is too strong, and the atmosphere too encouraging. There is no judgment, and there is in fact no direct request. There is just an opportunity to do, which is being provided in a conducive environment. Each one of us is handed a loose script and allowed, or more likely, encouraged and supported to improvise according to our personal horizon of expectations. The feeling of alienation is overcome by the ritual which seems strangely familiar, and which turns it into something else, more comforting. In the same time, the ritual has its own narrative, often apparently unrelated.

  1. *Dana Altman, Art Critic, New York in her book Art and Multiplicity

* Video: Jaime Kuri, Akshat Nauriyal

* Photos: Yoko Toda, Akshat Nauriyal

* Duration 50 minutes


> WATCH the documentation about the performance in New Delhi


  1. *Finalist at Arte Laguna Prize, Venice (2011)

  2. *798 Art District, Beijing. September 2009.

  3. *Grace Exhibition Space, New York. March 2010.

  4. *Sarai CSDS Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies, New Delhi. March 2011.