VESTANDPAGE

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Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke (she/they) and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes (he/him) have been working together as VestAndPage internationally in performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing and temporary artistic community projects.

VestAndPage have been devoted to experimental performance-based filmmaking to examine the evolution from original documentation of performative acts toward non-linear storytelling. They produce films as direct and visceral performances, which happen in response to critical environments "familiar as a dream" (London City Nights), such as polar glaciers, dormant vulcanoes, underground cave systems or in military enclaves.  Stenke and Pagnes use non-invasive equipment, working alone or with a small team. 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. They explore “thin places”: locations-in-between, where the veil between different temporalities, occurrences and stories is porous. To perform in these thresholds where the visible blends with the invisible, they apply a psychogeographical approach to activate memory and uncover layers of information and imagery stored in the human and beyond-human.

Working on performance art’s liminal, spectral and ritual nature, in an ongoing poetics of relations, they apply endurance, sublimation and risk-taking with a poetic bodily approach to art practice. They consider performance-based filmmaking an artistic practice that serves the body’s capacity to generate situated and embodied knowledge, convey meanings and shape concepts of intimate archiving. For them, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a resourceful vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking apparently disconnected human and beyond-human bodies, sites and happenings.

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They also commit to film as a mnemonic and archive and produce conversations and interviews on existential topics with inspiring people from the arts, culture and science.​ 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. In 2020, they published their Manifesto on performance-based filmmaking: Poetics of Relations on the Journal of Embodied Research as a video article.

They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their artistic research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology as lecturers and mentors worldwide.

For STRATA, they are responsible as artistic directors, producers, writers, and performers.

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www.vest-and-page.de