OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
MayDay
PERFORMANCE SUMMER CLASS
By VestAndPage
Thursday, 14 to Sunday, 17 September 2017
Atelier Performative Künste, Düsseldorf, Germany
It is for those who trust in change.
It is for the overstretched global bodies searching a home or on pilgrimage.
For those to whom the surreal is familiar, those who dance on the limits hand in hand.
For those who go to spaces of hidden beauty and scan into the flesh of dream matter— visionary poets, artists and performers pushed by an urgency.
For those who reconcile with the mystery to let things coexist,
for anything that remains alone is just a nothing per se.
For those who seek to express, not to impress.
For those who take risks in the name of seeking new images.
For those on a journey through visible places and invisible places,
actual places and imaginary places.
A nomadism aiming to empower one’s own art and openness,
leaving subtle traces, structuring temporary autonomous zones.
Taking action, because each one of us has important stories to tell.
And again, “Remember all, forget all."
Four days of full immersion into Performance Art at Atelier Performative Künste, Düsseldorf - MayDay is the occasion to work practically together with the artists duo VestAndPage in their collaborative practice. With the use of the bodies (physical, mental and spiritual) as primary artistic tools, MayDay focuses on the body as a poetic and imaginary landscape through the possibility of crossing the exterior-interior boundary. Changing contexts are used as a way to develop authentic modes of artistic action. It offers insight into VestAndPage's process-led and conceptual collaborative performance art practice in the name of the creation of illuminating universal meanings. VestAndPage work on a range of techniques and approaches, which reflect their practices and backgrounds along the interface of visual arts, performing arts and writing. More practical subjects will be the art of sustaining a life as an artist. Independence. Self reliance. Building temporary communities. Innovative approaches for new modes of existence. Be open, blind, silent, loud, quick, slow, humble, determined, collective.
ABOUT VESTANDPAGE
Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes have been creating live performances, performance-based films, performance visuals, poetic writings and community cultural projects together since over a decade as VestAndPage, exploring performance art as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, as well as through theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. Their writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. In a "Poetics of Relations" they examine notions of temporalities, memory strata, communication and fragility of the individual and the collective within social and environmental spheres, applying the themes of trust in change, endurance, union, pain sublimation and risk-taking with a poetic bodily approach to art practice and a focus on universal human experiences. Their collaborative practice has roots in contemporary visual and conceptual art, classical, oriental and social theatre, philosophy, anthropology, anthropoetics and political science, as well as in the study of rites, myths and religions, particularly Sufism, alchemy as well as the ancient Greek and Christian iconology, to analyse the significance of a subject’s matter within the culture that produces it. Between 2010 and 2012 they worked, studied and travelled widely in Antarctica, South America and Asia, where they produced performance cycles and the performance-based film trilogy sin∞fin, and strengthened their international network. On December 2012, they conceived and initiated the VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK, the biennial international live art exhibition project taking place in 2012, 2014 and 2016 at historical Venetian premises. The project has extensively presented historic pioneer works on exhibit in conjunction with live programs of durational performances, showing over 120 international artists, as well as on-going formative activities. Between 2014 and 2017, alongside further annual live performance cycles, VestAndPage produced Plantain, the performance-based feature film on a month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad in May/June 2015. Since 2006, their writings have been extensively published in books and magazines of contemporary art, among which Performance Research, Flash Art, Studio Research, Art&Education, Research Catalogue, Nexus. Their own publications The Fall of Faust - Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action and exhibition catalogues investigate the intimate tissue of creativity and artistic practice, questioning performance art as urgency.
German artist Verena Stenke, prior to her artistic, curatorial and publishing activities with VestAndPage, studied visual arts and holds qualifications as a Special FX make-up artists and mask maker, in Social and Oriental Theatre, contemporary dance and martial arts. Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes holds degrees in Philosophy and Modern Literature; certificates of High Education in Museology and Art Critic; diplomas of High Education in Creative Writing and as actor and operator in Social Theatre. He has worked as an independent curator, painter, glass sculptor, and writer, as well as artist and coordinator at several projects of the Venice Biennale.
For a total of 32 hours (every day 10:00 to 18:00h, with a one hour lunch break)
Places are limited to a maximum of 15 participants
Workshop fee: 280.- Euro
Applications are being accepted on a rolling base until August 31, 2017.
To apply for this workshop, please send a short letter outlining your background (with links to past works if possible) and urgency for participating in this workshop to verena@vest-and-page.de.
