German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together since 2006 as VestAndPage, generating art in the mediums of live performance, filmmaking and writing, and as independent curators. Their practice is contextual, process-led, situation-responsive and conceived psycho-geographically in response to natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites or architecture, hence unrepeatable and subdue to the given conditions. In a poetics of relations it examines notions of perception, reality, communication, fragility and failure of the individual and the collective within social or environmental spheres. Exploring what, as human beings, we still have to offer, VestAndPage question our existence within a humanity characterized by social exclusion and global atrocities. Animated by a nomadic, confrontational spirit, they apply the themes of risk-taking, acceptance, resistance, endurance and union with a poetic bodily approach to art practice. Their book The Fall of Faust - Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action (Florence, 2010) investigates the intimate tissue of creativity, questioning performance art as urgency.

Websites:

VestAndPage

Venice International Performance Art Week

sin∞fin The Movie

https://www.plantain-themovie.de/

Texts (selection | online downloadable pdf):

Two Bodies In Space | Durational Performance: the Quest for Authenticity in the VestAndPage Experience (Courtesy of Studio Research Journal, QCA | Griffith University, Brisbane, 2015)

Spaced, Art Out Of Place (Extended pdf. Courtesy of ArtLeaks Gazette, 2014)

Antarctic Dream - Ice as Architecture of the Human Spirit: VestAndPage Performative Work in Antarctica (Only first page available online. Courtesy of Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, Routledge, 2013)

Considering the Nature of the Poetic Image and its Performativity (Curatorial and catalogue text of the 1st Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week: Hybrid Body-Poetic Body, Venice, 2012)

Radical Transparency and Eco-Intelligence in Contemporary Performance art (Curatorial and catalogue text of the Live art project Making Up-Tearing Down, TinaB, Prague, 2011)   

Body Issues in Performance art: Between Theory and Praxis (Courtesy of Art&Education, NY, 2011)

Notes on Performance art, the Body and the Political.pdf (Curatorial and catalogue text of the 2nd Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week: Ritual Body-Political Body, Venice, 2014)

Lectures (selection | online downloadable pdf):  

On the ‘State’ of Performance art and What It Is (TEAK Academy, Helsinki, 2011; Lingnan University, HK, 2012; Nicosia Art University, Cyprus, 2013)

Body, Thought, Touch in the frame of Rock/Body: Performative Interfaces between the Geologic and the Body (University of Exeter, UK, 2016)

Two Bodies in Space | Durational Performance: The Quest for Authenticity in the VestAndPage Experience (SAIC, Chicago, US, upcoming on May 2017)

Curating non funded non profit and independent large scale Live art and performance exhibition projects: the example of the Venice International Performance Art Week (SAIC, Chicago, US, upcoming on May 2017)

Interviews (selection | online downloadable pdf):

Ron Athey in Conversation with Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage) (Exclusivity and courtesy of LADA - Live Art Development Agency, London, 2015)

My Body Asking Your Body Questions (VestAndPage Interviewed by Valeria Romagnini and Karlyn De Jong; Courtesy of Personal Structures & GAA Foundation, 2013)

Selected Interviews (2009-2015) 

Best Film Award for Plantain, the feature-length film based on the month-long performance walk by and with VestAndPage at Berlin Independent Film Festival 2018