VestAndPage – Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes – have developed a transdisciplinary practice over two decades at the intersection of performance art, filmmaking, artistic research, writing, and curatorial practice.

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Working internationally across critical natural environments, historical sites and contested public spaces, they create site-responsive performances in which bodies, places and their layered histories are active collaborators. Their practice moves between the embodied and the speculative, relating to what remains unseen, suppressed or unresolved within individual, collective and more-than-human spheres.

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Working through extended processes of encounter, VestAndPage approach performance as a means of relation and inquiry. They do not go to a place to tell its story, but to find its stories through presence, listening and co-telling. Their work investigates memory, trauma, vulnerability, spectrality and transformation, developing poetic counter-narratives across performance, film and artistic research. Performance-based filmmaking is central to their practice, where actions respond to specific locations. They use film performatively, developing nonlinear relations between bodies, landscapes, materialities and events.

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Alongside their artistic and research work, VestAndPage are the founders and artistic directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, an independent platform dedicated to the exhibition, production, research and transmission of performance art. The wider practice includes temporary artistic communities, collaborative pedagogies and publications on performance-as-research and performance-based filmmaking.

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VestAndPage have presented performances, films, exhibitions, and research internationally in museums, galleries, theatres, festivals, and public spaces across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Their work ranges from long-distance performance walks and durational live works to feature-length films and practice-based research projects, including Plantain, 1 9 Monologue, STRATA and the ongoing Visiting Immune Places.

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Artists of the tender collaborations, Verena and Andrea met in Berlin in 2006 and have since developed their artistic practice and life together. For them, artistic practice is a space for encounters: between artists, between human and more-than-human bodies, and between the living and the histories that continue to inhabit the places in which we move.

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Born into the triangle of a WWII concentration camp, a Cold War nuclear storage site and a pollutant-contaminated salt mine, German performance artist and filmmaker Verena Stenke (she/they) made critical sites the focus of their art. As a doctoral researcher in Artistic Research at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, they research performance art, embodied and situated narratives, and trauma and hauntings in public space. They hold an MA in Performing Public Space from Fontys Academy of the Arts, received professional training in Italy in Applied and Physical Theatre, and hold qualifications as a Special FX Makeup Artist and mask maker. For decades, they have been integrating mystical and somatic practices through training and practice in traditions of Sufi performance, yoga, and martial arts. They are further dedicated to film production and collaboration formats.

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Venetian-born artist-researcher, writer, and curator Andrea Pagnes (he/him) holds degrees in Philosophy and Modern Literature, certificates in Museology and Art Criticism, diplomas in creative writing, and is an actor and Applied Theatre operator. He is a certified practitioner of Transpersonal Rebirthing and has been working as a writer, visual artist, glass sculptor, artistic director, independent curator, and coordinator for various Venice Biennale exhibition projects. As the editor-in-chief of Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance (PEET) and co-founder and artistic director of the Venice International Performance Art Week, he is dedicated to producing, researching, and publishing on inclusive and ethical performance practices, collaborative pedagogies and co-creation formats, and performance art legacies.

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