Since 2006, artist Verena Stenke and artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working internationally as VestAndPage in performance art, performance-based film, publishing, and temporary artistic community projects for generative inquiry and collective imaginings. Artists of the tender collaborations, for over a decade, VestAndPage have explored performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their transdisciplinary art practice, artistic research and curatorial projects.

 

Embodying ecological, philosophical and queer feminist thought, they have produced performance-based art and films, among others, under Antarctic glaciers, at the Himalayan foothills, in the vastness of Tierra del Fuego, in military enclaves, or inside prehistoric 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 is contextual and focuses on art's liminal, spectral and ritual nature. In an ongoing poetics of relations, they move through transcorporeal encounters.

 

Their works have been presented worldwide at various sites, from month-long five-day performance walks to 24-hour durational performances. They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their practice-led research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology on collaborative performance and filmmaking as lecturers, performance pedagogies, and mentors in master classes. They have also been visiting artists at art academies worldwide.

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VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and soma- and site-responsive and often conceived in response to natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites, and architectures. They are focused on the liminal, spectral and ritual nature of performance art, often in 'thin places': locations-in-between, where the veil between different temporalities, occurrences and stories is porous. They perform in these thresholds through an approach of queer ecology where the visible blends with the invisible. To create new myths and narratives, they activate co-tellings by uncovering layers of information, memory and imagery stored in human and more-than-human bodies and milieus.

 

In an ongoing poetics of relations, they encounter the other and make space for inclusive Temporary Artistic Communities of generative inquiry and collective imaginings. 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 and a focus on universal human experiences. Their collaborative practice has roots in Applied Theatre and Theatre of the Middle East, literature, philosophy, political sciences, and visual and conceptual art. VestAndPage's works allow viewers to address realistic content through fresh iconography in an otherworldly surrounding by presenting material from a personal and genetic library accessed through insightful thinking and 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 contextual, non-linear storytelling. They produce their film works on-site as direct and visceral performances, which are never rehearsed or staged and happen in response to extreme environments. 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; they go to a place to find its story. For VestAndPage, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a creative vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking apparently disconnected persons, things and 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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VestAndPage's critical artistic research and poetic writings have been extensively published in books and magazines of contemporary art, including Performance Matters, Performance Research, Flash Art, Studio Research, Art&Education, Research Catalogue, Journal of Embodied Research, Ephemera Journal, Revista Experimenta, Repertório Livre, Nexus. Their own publications by VestAndPage press investigate the intimate tissue of creativity and artistic practice, questioning performance art as urgent.​

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

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Since December 2012, VestAndPage have been curating their 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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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 performance art, theatre, dance, visual art, and music.

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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, contemporary dance, and martial arts.

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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.

 

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

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