VestAndPage
In residence: May 2025
VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes, interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators who have worked internationally with a focus on collaborative and research-based performance art and film since 2006. Their works are contextual and situation-responsive, embodying philosophical, ecological, and queer feminist thought. Focusing on transcorporeal and psychoterratic states and art's ritual nature, collective co-tellings, and imaginings, they have produced performance-based art and films under Antarctic glaciers, at the Himalayan foothills, in the vastness of Tierra del Fuego, in military enclaves, inside prehistoric cave systems, and other glacial, lithic, and subterranean milieus.
In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they perform at thresholds through an approach of queer ecology, where the visible blends with the invisible, moving between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the potential.
VestAndPage will use their residency at Artica Svalbard to inquire with a performative and practice-based approach into the transcorporeal and psychoterratic realms of the island. Through performance, moving images, and the lenses of philosophy and queer ecology, they aim to co-create with bodies and sites, in which the enmeshedness of external and internal milieus tell a story.
Their work has been produced, performed, and presented at the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, Boston Center for the Arts, Arnolfini Bristol, Prague City Gallery, Sculpture Quadrennial Riga, and Goodman Arts Centre Singapore. They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology on collaborative performance and filmmaking through master classes and as visiting artists and lecturers at art academies worldwide.
Verena Stenke
Verena Stenke was born in Germany. She holds qualifications as a Special FX Makeup Artist, mask maker, and costume designer. She studied Applied Theatre and Theatre, Rites, and Dances of the Middle East. For 25 years, Verena has practiced somatics through yoga, contemporary dance, and martial arts.
Andrea Pagnes
Andrea Pagnes, born in Venice, holds degrees in philosophy and modern literature, certificates in museology and art criticism, diplomas in creative writing, and qualifications as an actor and operator of Applied Theatre. He is a certified practitioner of Transpersonal Rebirthing and has worked as an artistic director, independent curator, glass sculptor, writer, and as an artist and coordinator at several Venice Biennale projects.
VestandPage’s residency has received financial assistance from the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
