From 26 to 29 April 2023, Visual Arts students will have the opportunity to work closely with the artist duo VestAndPage. Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage internationally in performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing and temporary artistic community projects.
The masterclass “The Nature of the Poetic Image in Motion and its Performativity” is dedicated to the dynamic intersection of the two art forms performance art and filmmaking and their conceptual, aesthetic, and practical aspects. Starting from VestAndPage’s “Manifesto of Performance-Based Filmmaking”, it looks theoretically and practically at factors of production and presentation. It expands upon the Poetics of Relations, VestAndPage’s embodied research since 2006, to discuss some of the conditions and methods. The students will explore the differentiation between objective and subjective points of view and perspectives while performing for the video camera, and will look at excerpts from performance-based films that refine their exploration of imaginary worlds and the interpretation of reality as it appears to the eye. Practical assignments such as re-performing seminal works, aim to enhance the students’ genuine expression of the private as the political and one’s inner universe to explore reality.
About VestAndPage
Among the protagonists of contemporary performance art, for over a decade, VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes) have been exploring performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their collaborative art practice, artistic research and curatorial projects. They have produced their site-responsive work under Antarctic glaciers, at the Himalayan foothills, in the vastness of Tierra del Fuego, in military enclaves, or inside prehistoric caves systems. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms, they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived in response to natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites and architectures, focusing on the liminal, spectral and ritual nature of art. They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their works have been presented at various sites and in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas worldwide.
Portrait image © Giulio Boehm
Find out more on VestAndPage
