FEAR vs LOVE vs FEAR (2012)

24-hour performance
Comissioned by Fundación Alumnos47, Mexico City
In occasion of Proyecto Liquido: Miedo. Curated by Jessica Berlanga Taylor.
June 2012

Photographs by Lorena Alcaraz M., Courtesy of Fundación Alumnos47.

"Fear vs Love vs Fear" is a 24-hour performance commissioned by Fundación Alumnos47 for the curatorial project Proyecto Liquido by Jessica Berlanga Taylor, which took place in a disused house in San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City, in June 2012.
For this work, VestAndPage inhabit the empty house for the duration of one day and one night. Visitors are free to enter and exit the house at anytime, moving through the rooms to discover the installations and performers in ever-changing actions. Each room of the two floors hosts an installation, inside which Stenke and Pagnes intervene performatically during the course of the 24 hours. Preceding the actual performance, VestAndPage had held a 6 days intensive workshop with street-girls of Mexico City, investigating with them in an intensive process their fears, desires and dreams. The video and text material, as well as plasticine puppets produced by the girls during the workshop, is part of the performance installation.
​The project is inspired by the psychology theory that only two basic human emotions exist: Fear and Love, and that all other emotions are aberrations of one of these.

+ Read more about the workshop project with the street-girls on the blog fearisfear.wordpress.com.

"Stenke’s and Pagnes’ intimate connection with body and language is evident in each of their projects. Their works are charged with aesthetic theory and personal philosophy, and it is the atmosphere of intimacy that they create through working on complex themes such as abuse, contamination, death, solitute, fragility, exclusion and rejection, and which produces a trust between the spectator and the artists. A link is made between the experiences of the artists and the personal history of the performance’s testimonies. It is in this communicative act without words that lies the possibility to confront our fears. Verena and Andrea of the sensitive bodies are searching for other sentients between those that observe them acting."

Jessica Berlanga Taylor, Curator Proyecto Liquido, Mexico City