transitstation copenhagen 2010

Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes work together since 2006 as VestAndPage concentrating mainly on Performance and Video Art - they found within these disciplines the perfect common ground to investigate topics they concern: impermanence - fragility - transformation - memory activation and a translative poetry.

The German Verena Stenke studied Fine Arts and Makeup artistry. She trained martial arts, later Contemporary and Butoh dance during her living in Berlin. In 2006 she moved to Florence, where she studied Rites and Dances of Sufism and Theatre with Kassim Bayatly in intensive laboratories, as well as Social Theatre with IsoleComprese Teatro. She also works in sound and video arts.

The Venetian born Andrea Pagnes has achieved his Master Diploma in Art Critic and Museology and the Degree in Modern Literature and Philosophy in Venice, the Diploma of Social Theatre Actor from Isole Comprese Teatro Florence, and in Creative Writings (Method Raymond Carver, Rome). He has published art essays, prose and poetry and worked as translator, journalist and independent curator and coordinator for site projects for several Venice Biennales. As visual artist, he exhibited his paintings, sculptures and installations internationally.

VestAndPage exhibit their art works and present their performances on international festivals, events, exhibitions and Biennials in Europe, Asia, the United States and South America.
They give lectures on their researches and publications, as well as practical workshops on performance and theatre in renowned international institutions like La Salette University (Santiago City, Philippines), Deutsches Institut (Florence, Italy), BITEF Theatre (Belgrade), Centro de Las Artes (San Luis Potosì, Mexico). VestAndPage are idea-makers and coordinators of the current global art initiative 'FRAGILE - global performance chain journey'.
Their book 'The Fall of Faust - Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action' has recently been published by VestAndPage press.

transitstation copenhagen 2010
photo: Bernhard Winkler

The VestAndPage performance SKIN DEEPER is a metaphor, which refers to the permanent ritualistic coding we each have to decipher on a daily basis, but also offers the gateways to exorcise alienation by means of physical contact and programmatic lack of mediation. In the universe of uniformity and of five-minute celebrity, reality shows and fast downloading, there is a ubiquitous need for identification and belonging, for communicating with the other and ultimately, for ritualistic attempts to regain control over oneself and the universe in the process. But in this permanent search for the new, for the shocking and the different, even though behavioural patterns are ultimately the ones which help us maintain an apparent balance because they reconnect personal experience to the previous structures which have proven valid and functional until now and they help us re-chart memory streams, there are moments when one has to be willing to go beyond them, to the root of things. Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes are here to tell us that real communication cannot be replaced by mechanical, mediated actions which have no relevance because they do not convey anything, and the need to exist as individual willing to open up and exorcise all fears is more acute than ever in the twenty-first century, in spite of all the cultivated illusion of the cocooned global village.

Dana Altman, from 'Art and Multiplicity', New York, 2008

transitstation copenhagen 2010
photo: Bernhard Winkler