Verena Stenke* and Andrea Pagnes** have been working together since 2006 as VestAndPage in body-based contemporary live art performance, film, visual art, and writing. Their art practice researches private and social spheres through fragility, transformation, vertigo, conflicts, infection, rejection and the idea of union.

Being present in galleries, museums, biennials, theaters and at festivals in Europe, Asia, South Africa, United States and South America, they curate, lecture and conduct practical workshops on Performance art.

Their film series sin∞fin The Movie combines Performance with filmmaking. In 2012, VestAndPage produced the final episode of it in Antarctica.

The book The Fall of Faust - Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action and essays by Andrea Pagnes are decoding the hidden fabric of artistic activity.

Their site-specific performances and installations have been realized and presented not only in white cubes or black boxes, but have been specifically conceived i.e. for the spaces of a Mexican women prison and an Italian luxury hotel suite, as well as inside postindustrial architectures such as an iron factory, a car park paternoster, or a disused industrial space. They are responding to natural surroundings and historical sites such as Hope Bay in Antarctica, Kashmir foothills of Himalaya, a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego, Central America’s Sierra Tarahumara, Dead Sea in Israel, China’s Great Wall or Old Delhi’s 13th century ruins, in Patagonian wealthy pioneers’ houses and Venetian palazzos and museums’ courtyards.

1. **Andrea Pagnes (b. 1962 in Venice, Italy) translated among others Jurassic Park into Italian, and has been working as writer, painter, curator, founder of culture magazines, glass sculptor and artistic director of a Murano glass factory. He holds degrees in Modern Literature and Philosophy, and certificates of high studies in Museology, Art Critic, and Creative Writings. He obtained the diploma of Social Theatre operator, working as actor and writer with psychic patients, former drug-addicted as well as physically disabled people. This opened up his way to an approach to arts, which works on the limits of personal risk-taking for a discourse about conflictual social and personal responsibilities. He has been awarded among others with the Strasbourg Robert Schuman Silver Medal (1990), Millennium Painting Award in representation of Italy (Windsor&Newton, 2000), and the literary prize Storie (2008).

1. *Verena Stenke (b. 1981 in Bad Friedrichshall, Germany) was trained as dancer, athlete, martial and makeup artist. Having gone through the labyrinths of black box theaters for years, her work is now primarily site-responsive, combining situationally induced movement and filmmaking. Her training in Oriental and Social Theatre contribute to a highly corporal artistic exploration, which is both technically process-led and based on the conditions of here and now. Having grown up in a culture rooted deeply in discipline and progress, she is interested in the concepts of loss of control, liminality and conditioning. The performance Speak That I Can See You has been rewarded with the ArtKontakt Prize (2007), her video art has been rewarded in Italy and Germany and her films presented on numerous festivals.

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