Verena Stenke German artist and Andrea Pagnes Italian artists are two of those very inspiring artists that I have had the pleasure to meet and to be part of in my life. They have been working together since 2006 as VestAndPage project in performance art, performance-based film, also publishing about art performance all over the world. By now they created many live performances, film works, the performance visuals. All their projects are exploring performance art as phenomena via creative practice, as well as via theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. The works I’ve seen have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, and a variety of other performing sites worldwide. Their books about contemporary art are fantastic too, very demanding but also very understandable to read, those are fascinating scientific theses about contemporary art. For all visual, art performance, contemporary artists I would recommend their publications The Fall of Faust – Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action where this amazing couple explores creativity and artistic practice, questioning performance art as artistic urgency of today.
Their collaborative practice is based on contemporary visual and conceptual art, classical, oriental and social theatre, philosophy, anthropology, anthro-poetics etc…In their performances VestandPage studies myths and religions, particularly Sufism, alchemy as well as ancient Greek and Christian iconology. Their live performances are extremely difficult and long because both of the artists can endure complicated, demanding, and painful performances.VestAndPage’s art practice are context and situation-responsive. They react to certain situations conceived by psycho-geographical context, within their artistic response to social contexts, natural surroundings, historical sites and architecture sites etc… For them, performance art is not just a medium to express, but a chance to explore the physical, mental and spiritual bodies through the possibility of crossing the exterior-interior boundary, and to meet the ephemeral matter of art’s existence.
The VestAndPage art, performance, film, and winner of the Berlin Independent Film Festival 2018 Plantain, https://www.plantain-themovie.de/ is a brilliant performance-based feature film about a month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad in May/June 2015. The project is based on true historic events of the escape of Stenke’s family in the civil exodus from former East Prussia in winter 1945. The Stenke’s family fled upon the evacuation of East Prussia in winter 1945, in the civil exodus along the Baltic Sea to Northern Germany: they crossed over 1100 kilometers of land on foot. This film investigates the process of acceptance of history, as personal collective archiving, as well as concepts of identity and permeability of cultural borders. It recalls with each one a member of the family, to look into time, mystery, war, courage, trauma etc… Their actions evolve in direct response to the objects they found along their way. The movie is not a documentary.
To get an idea go to this site
https://www.mymovies.it/ondemand/fuorinorma/movie/fuorinorma-plantain/
