Cine+Perfo

Since 2006, the German artist Verena Stenke and the Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have worked together as VestAndPage and have gained international recognition in the fields of performance art, performance-based filmmaking, writing, publishing and collective performance operas and temporary community art projects. For over a decade, VestAndPage have explored performance art and film as a phenomenon through their collaborative creative practice, as well as theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. His works have been presented in museums, galleries, theaters, cinemas and various places around the world. They are dedicated to a poetic approach in experimental and personal filmmaking based on performance art, questioning the perception of reality and how we process and store information. For VestAndPage, film and performance can cheat space-time, open up the unconscious as a creative vessel and reveal processes and relationships by linking seemingly unconnected people, things and events.

VestAndPage’s artistic practice is contextual and situationally sensitive, psycho-geographically conceived in response to the natural environment, social contexts, historical sites and architectures. They usually work in “thin places”, where the borders between spaces and times are the most fragile, liminal spaces where worlds come closer. In his works, they move between the invisible and the unforeseen, the unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. They investigate performance art as an urgency to explore physical, mental and spiritual bodies, where moments of crisis often see the crossing of boundaries by breaking with norms and presumed orders, to interact with the ephemeral matter of art and existence. In an ongoing “poetics of relationships”, they move in an encounter with the other.

Between 2010 and 2012 they produced their trilogy of short films based on the performance “sin∞fin” in Antarctica, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and India. Between 2014 and 2018, VestAndPage produced “Plantain”, an art film based on their month-long performative walk from northern Germany through Poland to Russia’s Kaliningrad region in May/June 2015. The project is based on real historical facts of the flight of Stenke’s family in the civilian exodus from the former East Prussia in the winter of 1945. In 2020 they published “Poetics of Relations – A Manifesto On Performance-Based Filmmaking” as a video article about their practice in the Journal of Embodied Research. That same year they produced “ANAM CARA – Mirror in the Mirror” through co-creation in confinement with 22 international performance artists, as well as “AMOR AND PSYCHE (In Times of Plagues)”, a short film about the nature of breath.

They are currently in post-production of their feature film based on the performance “STRATA” about deep time, made in collaboration with more than 20 artists and scientists in the caves of the Swabian Jura. They are developing “momentum,” a series of video conversations on existential issues with people from the arts, culture and science.

They are authors and producers of many other live performance works, video art and performance-based experimental short films, and are lecturers at the Master of Performance Practice in Arnhem (NL), as well as founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week (IT). They currently live in Germany and Venice.

www.vest-and-page.de