VestAndPage's performance art works and research
range from live performance cycles and collective performance operas,
over performance-based films and writings
to temporary artistic community projects.
They are the founders and artistic directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week. Currently, they are in post-production for STRATA, a performance-based feature film on Deep Time and momentum, an ongoing series of videos that hosts existential conversations with people from the arts, culture and science. They are performing 1 9 Monologue, an autobiographical performance monologue about the body as a home of pathogens, and Lost Matter, a ritual on the climate emergency.
Below is a selection of current and most recent works.
For selected past works until 2006, please visit here.
Venice International Performance Art Week
Since 2012
The live art exhibition project and educational program with residential character for a temporary artistic community in historic Venetian palazzos conceived and directed by VestAndPage.
Cover image UNDER SCARS © Giorgia de Santi photographed by Camille Guibaud
Venice International Performance Art Week
Curation | Live art exhibition project
Ongoing since 2012
Lost Matter
2022, Performance ritual
An act of intimate reflection, a moment of recollection.
A recognition of the capitalism-caused climate crisis and the colonization of land.
A collective mourning about what we lose every day.
Body, Climate Change, Ecology, Deep Time, Mourning, Ritual, Collective
Lost Matter
Performance ritual
2022/23
STRATA
2021/2022, Performance-based film
In caves of human prehistory, the project brings together artists and researchers from the humanities, social and geologic sciences to investigate the human body as a place that exists in continuity with the geological. Body artists illuminate concepts of deep time, past and modern human cultures through performances for the camera in caves.
Body, Geology, Ecology, Deep Time, History, Science, Documentary
STRATA
Performance-based film
2021 / 2023 (in post-production)
1 9 Monologue
2020, Performance monologue
The experience of being as a body home to pathogens flows into this autobiographical performance text while building a bridge between precise self-observation and a global, historical and literary outside. While many in Europe consider it to be long since eradicated, it still presents the deadliest pandemic worldwide. The talk is about tuberculosis.
Body, Biology, Pathogens, Monologue
1 9 Monologue
Performance text
2020-ongoing
L–A–U–R–A
2022, Psychogeographic memory activation
Based on the imaginary diary entries of the first female Neckarsulm winegrower Laura Haas (1835-1899), several decades of 19th-century city history are illuminated at the site of happening. Memories from the past are poetically interwoven with the present memories of visitors. Part of the series about underrepresented women in Neckarsulm's city history that started in 2021 with the imagination installation Im Schilde.
Feminism, History, Research, Archive, Environment
L–A–U–R–A
Memory activation
2022
momentum
In development, Video series
Documentary, Zeitgeist, History, Philosophy, Science, Dialogue
momentum
Video series
2020-ongoing
Im Schilde
2021, Imagination installation and public intervention
Im Schilde is an imagination installation and public intervention conceived on the occasion of the 1250th anniversary of the town of Neckarsulm. The work calls for the recognition and naming of women in historical memory, exemplified by street names as a means of forming the identity of a city and its citizens.
Urban, City, Street signs, Feminism, History, Research, Archive
IM SCHILDE
Imagination installation and
public intervention
2021
Poetics of Relations
A Manifesto on Performance-Based Filmmaking
2020, Video article
This video article expands upon the "Poetics of Relations", the embodied research of VestAndPage, which informs their performance-based filmmaking theory and practice.
Embodied Practices, Film, Performance art, Manifesto, Geopsychology, Strange stranger, Hyperobjects
Poetics of Relations
Manifesto on
Performance-Based Filmmaking
2020
AMOR AND PSYCHE (In Times of Plagues)
2020, Short film, 9'24" min
A performatic approach to the chemical, physiological, psychological and spiritual aspects of Breath. Initially conceived during Stenke's tuberculosis disease in 2019, the work has been resumed and actualized during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
AMOR AND PSYCHE
(In Times of Plagues)
Short film / Three-channel video
2020
HOME
2017-2020, Performance cycle
In a time in which people continue to displace – forcibly or by choice, HOME inquires into the concepts of Home and the ideal force of a community and sites of belonging, while at the same time questioning the precarious umbrella of state systems and norms that ascribe conventional meanings to both the collective and places. The chapters are developed through intensive co-creation processes with collaborating artists, presented as final collective performance operas.
HOME
Cycle of collective
performance operas
2017-2020
ANAM CARA –
Mirror in the Mirror
2020, Film
A collective co-created performance-based film about the concept of home by and with VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. Produced during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in April and May 2020, the film is a radical contemporary fairy tale, a journey through an imaginary dwelling.
Home, Pandemic, History, Co-Creation, Collective
ANAM CARA
Mirror in the Mirror
Performance-based film
2020
Spinning, stirring, sweeping
2020, Video performance
A video performance response to the 1992-performance by MARILYN ARSEM, combining layers of the historic performance archive material with actions by Verena Stenke and Sara Simeoni in 2020.
History, Crafts, Storytelling, Feminism, Magic, Mythology
Spinning, Stirring,
Sweeping
Video
2020
SIGNUM
2018, Short film, 33 min.
A quest for real and imaginary signs – words and poetry to be revealed, composed and transcoded by the same geological strata from which they emerge. In search for expressions, languages to speak and connections to be made beyond what words can name.
Performance, Semiotics, Nature, Geology, Ecology, Strange stranger
SIGNUM
Performance-based film
2018
Plantain
[Spitzwegerich]
2018, Film, 90 min
Starting from their personal German family story, VestAndPage embarked in May 2015 on a month-long performance walk from Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad, to perform and film on the location of true events of post-WWII displacements. In 7 episodes, the resulting feature-length art film questions oblivion through a series of poetic moving images.
Art, Biography, History, Philosophy, War
