Transdisciplinary artists and curators of the tender collaborations in the ephemeral and immaterial, VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes. They have been working together nomadically since 2006, using performance art, film and installation centred around critical bodies and sites to express philosophical and ecological thought. They have produced site-responsive, performance-based art in polar, subterranean, military, clinical, volcanic, megalopolitan and other critical milieus, focusing on art's ritual and liminal nature, collective imaginings, and transcorporeal and psychoterratic states. In a reflexive mode for new expressions of interior landscapes, they don't go to a place to tell a story, but to find its story.
They investigate the mystery that dwells at the ephemeral between the untold and the repressed, the forgotten and the potential, and the private and public as part of their visual (im)materiality. They convey the invisible and unspoken of the individual and collective through speculative narratives and co-tellings by tend(er)ing imagery stored in human and beyond-human bodies and milieus.
They care about constantly advancing performance art as a social practice, a living tradition and practice-based research as a pivotal driver for cultural change, through temporary artistic communities in fluid artist collectives and as the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week. Through research and poetic writings, they relay the intimate tissue of creativity and embodied practice, transmitting performance art as the urgent methodology of today. Their works have been presented internationally in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas, in differing formats from month-long performance walks, over 5-days to 24-hour performances. They share their knowledge on collaborative performance and filmmaking as mentors worldwide and broadly published their practice-led research in journals and books.