individual and the collective within social or environmental spheres. Animated by a nomadic, confrontational spirit, they apply the themes of acceptance, resistance, endurance and union with a poetic bodily approach to art practice.

Their works have been produced and presented internationally in a variety of sites, museums and galleries, and have been described as transfixing, confronting, spellbinding, humble, uncomfortable, carrying fresh iconography, cathartic, visceral, liminal, otherworldly, shamanic, tensional, silent, delicate or mysterious. 

Between 2010-2012, VestAndPage produced their debut art film trilogy sin∞fin The Movie, a complex visual research realised during three years in Antarctica, South America and Asia. The project examines the relationship between the ephemeral art form of performance with filmmaking. Their current long-term performance Plantain | Spitzwegerich (2015/2016) results in a new performance-based art film, produced during the one-month performance including a walk of 1000 km through Northern Germany, Poland and Russia (Release: January 2016).

 

Stenke and Pagnes are the initiators and independent curatorial force behind projects such as the live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week. Their theoretical and poetic writings have been published in books and magazines of contemporary art among which Performance Research, Flash Art, Studio Research, Art&Education, How we teach performance art, Re-Tooling Residencies, World of Art, Hesa Inprint,Research Catalogue, Nexus. 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 an urgency.

 

Stenke and Pagnes are recipients of the Project Grant by the BKM - German Federal Government Comissioner for Culture and the Media (2015), Fellowship of the Cultural Program of Argentina’s National Antarctic Direction (2012), AIR Taipei International Residence Fellowship (2012), Treviglio Video Poetry Prize (2011), Culture Prize of the City of Nassau (2011), Project Grant by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Freundeskreis (2010), Storie Literary Prize (2008), Art Kontakt Prize (2007), Windsor & Newton Millennium Painting Award in Representation of Italy (2000) and the Robert-Schuman-Silver Medal for European Unity (1990).

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German artist Verena Stenke (b. 1981) and Venetian artist and writer Andrea Pagnes (b. 1962) 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