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 / 2024
futura spagyrica
2023, Multimedia installation
A future healing of the collectively dis-eased body. A transcorporeal route into the human body inspired by ancient alchemy. An anatomic itinerary that embraces the human and the nonhuman, form and space.
Body, Healing, Alchemy, Participatory, Ritual, Collective
futura spagyrica
Transcorporeal anatomic itinerary
2023
HOME
2017 - ongoing, Cycle of collective performance operas
In a time in which people continue to displace – forcibly or by choice – the current performance cycle of VestAndPage 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 of HOME are developed through intensive co-creation processes with collaborating artists, presented as final collective performance operas. During these processes of production, we migrate towards ourselves and one another.
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
UNDER SCARS
2022, Collective performance opera
A gathering of performers who challenge their practice to attempt novel perspectives on art and society. A collective work that gravitates around the themes of disability, severe diseases, addiction, patriarchy, capitalism, abuse and discrimination. The wounds and stigma they cause are dealt with poetically through performance actions and artmaking rituals of kinship and togetherness.
Collective, Margins, Kinship
UNDER SCARS
Collective performance opera
2022
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
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
Plantain
[Spitzwegerich]
Feature film based on a month-long performance walk
2018
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
Venice International Performance Art Week
Since 2011
The live art exhibition project and educational program with residential character in historic Venetian palazzos conceived and directed by VestAndPage
Venice International Performance Art Week
Curation | Live art exhibition project
2012 ongoing
AEGIS
2016 - 2017, Performance cycle in 6 parts
Protective qualities of living matter, defence functions, shielding systems and security make us question what are valuable and timeless protections and safeties. The bodily symbolic acts honour a human trait and persons that embody it. It is accompanied by the reading of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the language of the place and closed by members of the audience speaking their considerations voice-looped as the final Choir of Aegis.
AEGIS
Performance cycle
2016 - 2017
Yggdrasil
2017 Performance opera
A hybrid theatre project combining experimental spoken word theatre and contemporary performance art. Starting from a contemporary Western confusion of rationality and absolutist ideas resulting in meaninglessness and detachment from our own mythological ritual roots, YGGDRASIL ventures into collective and individual believes. Inspired by the worldview of the Northern European mythology that once formed the base of a belief system, the work developed through the research of ritualistic practices from around the world.
Yggdrasil
Performance opera
2016
SiO2 – The Reason of Fragility:
Contemporary Artists Facing Glass
2015, Exhibition project by VestAndPage
Albanian National Gallery of Arts, Tirana
With works by Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Chris Burden, Tony Cragg, Jan Fabre, Seamus Farrell, Joseph Kosuth, Armando Lulaj, Boris Nieslony, Yoko Ono, Jaume Plensa, Douglas Quin, Lawrence Weiner, Leonardo Cimolin, Dana Dal Bo, Andrea Morucchio, Nelda Ramos, Ermal Baboçi & Lindita Doçi, Klodian Deda, Eros Dibra, Oltsen Gripshi, Shqipe Jonuzi, Sead Kazanxhiu, and Ermela Teli.
SiO2 – The Reason of Fragility: Contemporary Artists Facing Glass
Exhibition project
2015
DYAD
2014 - 2015, Performance cycle in 9 parts
Interested in what divides and separates us, and how divisions are applied socially and politically as mechanisms, we look into the dangers of dichotomy, attachments to dualism, and the paradox of Ego. Through a series of poetic bodily images, DYAD questions how polarities are employed as effective tools of ideology, propaganda or collective manipulation.
DYAD
Performance cycle
2014 - 2015
A Morphologic
Journey II
(On the Borders of Our Bodies)
2014, Performance
Started in 2011 at KARST Gallery as a 3-hour performance in four episodes, the performance is inspired by the journey of Ulysses under the aspect of his encounters with a variety of women. Splintering impressions of encounters with archetypes of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa and Penelope are guideline analogies of behavioural patterns of people on the run, men and women in search to forget, longing for union and something that may finally last. The performance continued with part II in January 2014 upon VestAndPage's return to KARST.
A Morphologic Journey II
Performance
2014
Topolino
A Globetrotter's Fairy Tale
2014, Silent film
A series of performance-based videos shot at Mount Sodom, the Negev Desert, the Dead Sea, the Bosporus, Tuscany, the Chinese Wall, Glacier Perito Moreno, and Antarctica. Topolino is lost, lonesome and nostalgic, on his journey to extraordinary places. In a search for the myths that surround them, he entangles himself in failures and encounters first of all himself and his stereotypes.
Adventure, Art, Comedy, Drama, Family
Topolino
A Globetrotter's Fairy Tale
Performance-based film
2014 ongoing
Thou Twin of Slumber
2013, Performance cycle in 8 parts
Inspired by J. S. Bach’s cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, this cycle goes into death, sleep and slumber and liminal spaces, looking to wave mythical reflections on decay and rebirth into the narrative of urban regeneration. The moth is the animal totem of this cycle, and the single episodes are named after stages of its life cycle.
Thou Twin of Slumber
Performance cycle
2013
sin∞fin
Performances at the Core of the Looking-Glass
2012, Trilogy episode short, 45'42" min
Produced in Antarctica, the concluding episode short of the sin∞fin trilogy engages through narratives on the comprehensive spheres of nature and the universe. The trilogy of art films of collaborative performances in epic locations around the world teeters between the real and the visionary and is amplified by unfamiliar environments.
DVD | VOD | www.sinfin-themovie.de
Biography, Documentary, Drama, Environment, Science, Philosophy
sin∞fin
Performances at the Core of the Looking-Glass
Performance-based film
2012
FEAR vs LOVE vs FEAR
2013, Long durational performance of 24 hours
VestAndPage inhabit an empty house in Mexico City for the duration of 24 hours. Before the performance, they held a 6-days intensive workshop with Mexico City street girls, inquiring together about their fears and dreams. The video and text material produced by the girls are part of the performance installation. The project is inspired by a psychology theory stating that only two basic human emotions exist: Fear and Love and that all other emotions are aberrations of one of these two.
FEAR vs LOVE
vs FEAR
Durational performance of 24 hours
2012
TERRA NOVA (AmundsenScottOates)
2012, Performance
Takes as inspiration the lives and ventures of the Polar explorers at the beginning of the 20th Century, which VestAndPage studied in their artist-in-residence in Antarctica in January 2012. The performance circles around the last words that British Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates said to his companions before he walked out into a blizzard towards his self-sacrificing death during Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition.
TERRA NOVA (AmundsenScottOates)
Performance
2012
The Smile at the Top of the Ladder
2012, Performance
Inspired by Henry Miller's book The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, the touching fable of Auguste the clown, as well as a tribute to other clown figures of art.
The performance develops around absurdity towards humour and sound, quotidian absurdism and failures.
The Smile at the Top of the Ladder
Performance
2012
Panta Rhei
2011 - 2012, Performance cycle in 7 parts
The cycle works on impermanent states and the concept of change and transformation, referring not only to the transitory states of matter, life and relations but also to the temporary nature of thoughts and presumed orders. Is there something indefinite to cling to, when all is altered within the course of continuous evolution?
Panta Rhei
Performance cycle
2011 - 2012
sin∞fin Performances at the Holy Centre
2011, Trilogy episode short, 37'14" min
Produced in Northern India and Kashmir, the second episode short of the sin∞fin trilogy highlights the sphere of society and religion. The trilogy of art films of collaborative performances in epic locations around the world teeters between the real and the visionary and is amplified by unfamiliar environments.
DVD | VOD | www.sinfin-themovie.de
Biography, Documentary, Drama, Environment, Science, Philosophy
sin∞fin
Performances at the Holy Centre
Performance-based film
2011
Without Tuition or Restraint
2011, Long durational performance of 5 days and 4 nights
A durational performance experiment about the idea of freedom, in which Pagnes is jailed inside a dog crate in the gallery space for five days and four nights consecutively. Stenke is closed inside the gallery, following one durational action every day. The gallery is open to the public during opening hours. The title of this performance is the conclusive words of a quote by Irish political theorist Edmund Burke.