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Verena Stenke VestAndPage Bald Head Girl Skull Thanatos
VestAndPage-vase.jpg

Image: Lorena Lacaraz, 2012

EN / DE / IT

Since 2006, artist Verena Stenke and artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working internationally as VestAndPage in performance art, film, publishing, and temporary artistic community projects for generative inquiry and collective imaginings. Artists of the tender collaborations, VestAndPage have explored performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their transdisciplinary art practice, artistic research and curatorial projects for over a decade. Embodying ecological, philosophical and queer feminist thought, they have produced performance-based art and films, among others, at critical sites under Antarctic glaciers, the Himalayan foothills, military enclaves, or in cave systems. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their art practice focuses on art's liminal, spectral and ritual nature and in an ongoing poetics of relations, they move through speculative encounters with bodies of humans, nonhumans and sites.

 

Their art and curations have been presented worldwide at exhibitions, festivals and conferences, from month-long performance walks to 24-hour durational performances. They have received various recognitions, including the Robert Schuman Silver Medal for European Unity (1990) and Best Film at the Berlin Independent Film Festival (2018). Performances and exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, National Gallery of Albania, Sculpture Quadriennale Riga, Prague City Gallery, MEET Digitual Cultural Centre Milan, State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, Oostend Art Triennial, Arnolfini Bristol, Akbank Sanat Istanbul, Museo Universitario del Chopo Mexico City, Museo de Arte Tigre Buenos Aires, Taipei Artist Village, Museum of Contemporary Art Caracas, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean and the European Cultural Centre in Venice. 

 

Since 2012, they have been the co-founders, artistic directors and curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week, the referential platform for exhibition, production and education of performance art, and presidents of the non-profit cultural association EntrAxis, which promotes interdisciplinary and intercultural social practices that focus on bodies and sites. They were lead coordinators and curators on the Creative Europe supported project DigiLabAiR which promoted inclusion, participation, and reflection through performance art and live art co-creation processes in a hybrid online artist-in-residence mode. 

 

Their work is featured in various publications, including the upcoming publication by Routledge: Provocations on Home, Place and Belonging Through Arts-Based Research, and the Palgrave Macmillan books Communicating Ice through Popular Art and Aesthetics. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication (2024) and Performing Landscapes – Performing Ice (2020), in Rosa Lee Goldberg’s seminal The Art of Performance (German edition, 2014) and many other magazines, including Flash Art International, Artforum International and stayinart. They co-author performance-as-research, which is extensively published in books, magazines and journals of contemporary art, including Performance Matters, Performance ResearchUndercurrents Journal of Critical Environmental StudiesJournal of Embodied Research, Studio ResearchArt&Education, Ephemera Journal, Revista ExperimentaRepertório Livre or Nexus. Their own publications by VestAndPage press investigate the intimate tissue of creativity and artistic practice, questioning performance art as urgent.

They were members of the AHCR artistic research network Rock/Body: Performative Interfaces between the Geologic and the Body at the University of Exeter and are partner in the PEEK research project Seismography of Precarious Presences at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. They are mentors and lecturers for performance practice and theory at the MA Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, and Art for Social Change at Accademia UNIDEE, Biella. They were visiting artist and researcher, among others, at the Royal College of Art London, the School of the Arts Institute Chicago, New York University Abu Dhabi, and the Norwegian Theatre Academy.

VestAndPage's art practice is site-responsive, conceived at critical natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites, and architectures. They work in 'thin places': locations-in-between, where the veil between different temporalities, occurrences and stories is porous. They perform in these thresholds where the visible blends with the invisible. To create new myths and narratives, they activate co-tellings by uncovering layers of imagery stored in human and beyond-human bodies and milieus. They examine threshold stages of instability, time, memory, communication and the fragility of the individual and the collective within social and environmental spheres. In an artistic journey from the inner onto the outside, the spiritual onto the physical, and the invisible onto the visible, they apply trust in change, endurance, union, pain sublimation and risk-taking with a poetic bodily approach to art practice. VestAndPage's works allow viewers to address realistic content through fresh iconography in an otherworldly surrounding by presenting material from a genetic library accessed through insightful thinking and embodied spiritual practices.

 

VestAndPage have been devoted to philosophical, performance-based filmmaking through which they examine the evolution from original documentation of performative acts toward complexly non-linear storytelling. They produce their film works on-site as visceral performances, which are never rehearsed and happen in response to critical sites. In a constant search through a reflexive mode for new images of interior landscapes, they consider the world their studio and host. They do not go to a place to tell a story but to find its story. For VestAndPage, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a creative vessel, and reveal relations by linking apparently disconnected happenings. Since 2010, they have produced three feature-length films, a silent film, a trilogy of shorts, two shorts and numerous interview series and art videos.

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Between 2010 and 2012, Stenke and Pagnes worked in Antarctica, South America and Asia. They produced performance cycles and the performance-based film trilogy sin∞fin and strengthened their international network.

Since December 2012, VestAndPage have been curating the live art exhibition project VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK. Between 2012 and 2016, it showcased in the Trilogy of the Body historic pioneer works on exhibit in conjunction with live programs of durational performances, presenting over 120 international artists and an ongoing educational program. Since 2017, they have presented Co-Creation Live Factory, an international educational platform with a residential and collaborative nature.

Between 2014 and 2018, alongside further annual live performance cycles, VestAndPage produced Plantain, the award-winning feature-length film based on the month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad. The autobiographical art project is based on actual historical events of the escape of Stenke's family in the civil exodus from former East Prussia in the winter of 1945.

Since 2019, they have been presenting their performance text on tuberculosis and the body as a home of pathogens: 1 9 Monologue.

In 2020, they published their manifesto on performance-based filmmaking: Poetics of Relations.

Since 2020, alongside further performance and short film creations, they are presenting momentum, a mnemonic archive for testimonial purposes presenting conversations with inspiring people from the arts, culture and science on existential topics.

2021-2024, they have been producing the performance-based feature STRATA, a film and practice-based research on Deep Time and layers of memory in human history and the geological In prehistoric caves of the Swabian Jura and through international collaborations and interdisciplinary processes, science meets performing arts.

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Transdisciplinary artist Verena Stenke (she/they) was born in Germany. She holds qualifications as a Special FX Makeup Artist, mask maker, and costume designer. She studied Applied Theatre and Theater, Rites, and Dances of the Middle East. For 25 years, Verena explored somatic practices through yoga and martial arts. They are dedicated to fluid collaborative formats of co-creation, co-curation, co-teaching and co-authoring.

Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes (he/him) holds degrees in philosophy and modern literature, certificates in museology and art criticism, diplomas in creative writing, and as an actor and operator of Applied Theatre. He is a certified practitioner of Transpersonal Rebirthing and has worked as an artistic director, independent curator, glass sculptor, writer, and an artist and coordinator at several Venice Biennale projects. He is editor-in-chief of Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance (PEET).

 

Stenke and Pagnes met in Berlin in 2006, live and work together as VestAndPage, and are married.

VestAndPage examine universal human experiences through the prism of extreme environments: taking the familiar and staging it within in an epic, alien landscape; the result being a heightened reality: both entirely surreal and as familiar as a dream.

David C James, London City Nights

VestAndPage are able to create images that are not only intense and touching but in the best sense: new.

Dr Ralf Peters

For VestAndPage, performance is also the sacred struggle for the freedom of human beings, each individual.

Dr Bernhard Stumpfhaus

VestAndPage don't work at heights. Vertigo comes from elsewhere.

Santiago Cao, Performances in Closed Spaces as Shared Intimacy

VestAndPage visit a limit that runs along with the sleep and nearby the dying, along with remembering and next to oblivion. They are not declaring the limit between them, they are dancing on it. We dance together with them.

Francesco Kiais

Stenke and Pagnes work on complex themes such as abuse, contamination, death, solitude, fragility, exclusion and rejection. Verena and Andrea of the sensitive bodies are searching for other sentients between those that observe them acting.

Jessica Berlanga Taylor

 

VestAndPage challenged ideas about what it means to be in a body and conjured romantic notions of what can be experienced beyond the physical realm.

Sandrine Schaefer, The Present Tense

 

Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke are here to tell us that real communication cannot be replaced by mechanical, mediated actions which have no relevance because they do not convey anything, and the need to exist as an individual willing to open up and exorcise all fears is more acute than ever in the twenty-first century, in spite of all the cultivated illusion of the cocooned global village.

Dana Altman, Art & Multiplicity

For ecological reasons, VestAndPage reduce air travel and no longer travel by plane in Europe.

We follow a Green Guide of Production.

© 2025 VestAndPage / Contact

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