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 internationally since 2006, using performance art and film centred on critical bodies at remote or contested public spaces to express philosophical, spectral and ecological thought. They have produced site-responsive, performance-based art in clinical, megalopolitan, military, polar, subterranean, volcanic, and other milieus. Through embodied and speculative processes, they relate counternarratives, performance art’s ritual, liminal nature, and collective imaginings in dialogue with the land. 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 private and public, the untold and the repressed, and the forgotten and the potential 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 more-than-human bodies and sites.
Their works have been presented internationally in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas, in different formats, from month-long performance walks to 5-day to 24-hour performances. They share their knowledge on collaborative performance and filmmaking as mentors worldwide and have broadly published their research in journals and books. 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 writing, they convey the intimate fabric of creativity and embodied practice, presenting performance art as the urgent methodology of today.